“Nobody understands

what ‘performance’ is today”

Joan Jonas meets Liam Gillick
1 0 3 M O U N T S T R E ET L O N D O N
NEW YORK
Laure Prouvost
138 Tenth Avenue
 Dan Flavin
in daylight or cool white
February 21–April 14, 2018

Stan Douglas
February 22–April 17, 2018

alternate diagonals of March 2, 1964 (to Don Judd), 1964 David Zwirner
daylight and cool white fluorescent light
12 ft. (366 cm) long on the diagonal New York
 6th Floor, 2017

Stan Douglas
DCTs and Scenes from the Blackout
February 22–April 7, 2018

David Zwirner
New York
 Installation view, artist’s studio, 2018. Courtesy David Zwirner and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. Photo: Jens Ziehe © VG Bildkunst, Bonn 2018

Sky Energy

New York
David Zwirner
February 22–April 7, 2018
Isa Genzken
 Adriano Costa
wetANDsomeOLDstuffVANDALIZEDbyTHEartist
Kölnischer Kunstverein
Cologne, Germany
17/02 – 25/03 2018

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy
Le Consortium
Dijon, France
02/02 – 20/05 2018

Neïl Beloufa
Palais de Tokyo
Paris, France
15/02 – 13/05 2018

Mariana Castillo Deball

To-day, February 20th
SCAD Museum of Art
Savannah, USA
20/02 – 05/08 2018

Mend e s Rua da Consolação 3368

01416 – 000 São Paulo SP Brazil

Wood 13 Rue des Sablons / Zavelstraat

1000 Brussels Belgium

DM 60 East 66th Street, 2nd floor

New York NY 10065 United States

www.mendeswooddm.com
info @ mendeswooddm.com

Image: Adriano Costa

 ArtReview vol 70 no 2 March 2018

Danish, Faisal and Asgar

When you’re writing this from India, as ArtReview is, form is something
of an issue. From the form of the nation with all the languages (India has
780, second only to Papua New Guinea’s 839), cultures and races it incorpo-
rates, to the lands and peoples it thinks it should incorporate. And, perhaps
right now, those it thinks it should not be incorporating. Is ‘Hindu’ a reli-
gion or a race? Can it have been used to designate a race and then have
become a religion (something that India’s Supreme Court has been forced
to legislate upon on more than one occasion)? Is the whole thing the fault
of foreign conquerors, be it the Mughals or the British, who forcibly shaped
the subcontinent into forms that are not native to the landscape or its
peoples and simply weren’t previously there?
Before you interrupt to howl “wassaneeothisgottadowivart” or mind-
lessly turn the page, ArtReview’s not bringing this up because it’s ‘gone
native’, as they used to say (because, naturally, ArtReview is partly native
to this part of the world – explanations saved for another time), or over-
dosed on William Dalrymple books; rather, it’s because form (in the sense
of how we express ourselves, how we shape our societies, how we address
other individuals within those societies and how we define individuals
and collectives within those societies) is subject to many of the key debates
of our times: from Trump–Weinstein America to Brexit Britain, neo-fascist
Austrian governments (on which subject – fascists, not Austrian govern-
ments – check out Mike Watson’s article on the rise of the right in relation

Rules and regulations

11
 to art later in this issue), the eu as a whole and… well, you get the point,
if ArtReview carries on you’ll just suspect it’s trying to fill up this space
by listing every aspect of our current global malaise. Look out for more
things to worry about next month, but in terms of these pages, form
is of interest as being one of the fundamental components of the visual
arts. And, as such, the visual arts provide a platform upon which form
can be pushed around, experimented upon and ultimately (or hopefully,
to be more honest about the whole thing) reformulated, if you like.
It’s for that reason that the cover of this issue is devoted to one of our
greatest living artists, Joan Jonas. And perhaps it’s also why ArtReview asked
another great artist, Liam Gillick, both to interview his fellow creator and
to shape her presence on the cover itself. For the past several years, Jonas has
pursued a uniquely animate form, a form that flows both through tradi-
tional mediums, such as sculpture, drawing and performance, and through
any holistic view of planet Earth: as a unity of humans and nonhumans,
where one component of the planetsphere is intricately connected to the
next. (Before you say it, ArtReview isn’t trapped in an ashram or some hippy
commune that the past 50 years forgot; it’s in a microhotel next to a 24-hour
market and is writing this because it can’t sleep: its travel agent described
it as ‘authentic’, and you all know that ArtReview is a sucker for that.)
So, as ArtReview settles down to the next instalment of Gangs of Wasseypur
in the hope that this one will finally put it to sleep, it’s going to leave you
with an issue that looks at how rigid form might be broken and a more
fluid dynamics might make the world a more interesting place. (Granted,
you need to extrapolate for that, but hey – you can’t expect ArtReview
to do all the work!) Shhh, now: Danish, Faisal and Asgar are off to retrieve
the body of their father, Sardar Khan… ArtReview

Choice

12
Fred Wilson
Afro Kismet

March 23 – April 28, 2018 6 Burlington Gardens LONDON

July 10 – August 17, 2018 510 West 25th Street NEW YORK
GRACE SCHWINDT MICHAËL BORREMANS
Sixteen Dances
Silent Dance
September 3 - October 14, 2017

March 7 - April 28, 2018

ZENO X GALLERY
Godtsstraat 15 2140 Antwerp Belgium
+32 3 216 16 26 www.zeno-x.com

ZENO X GALLERY
GODTSSTRAAT 15 2140 ANTWERP BORGERHOUT BELGIUM INFO@ZENO-X.COM WWW.ZENO-X.COM
 Bjarne Melgaard
Bodyparty (SuBStance paintingS)
curated By julia peyton-joneS
london
March 2018
ropac.net
Outrageous Fortune
JAY DEF E O A N D S U R R E A L I SM

MITCHELL-INNES & NASH

534 WEST 26TH STREET NEW YORK WWW.MIANDN.COM MARCH 1 – APRIL 7, 2018
 Francesco Gennari
Greetings from the Moon
March 16 – April 14, 2018

Ceal Floyer
March 16 – April 14, 2018

Potsdamer Strasse 81E

D – 10785 Berlin
www.estherschipper.com
 KARLA BLACK

LUKE FOWLER

February 17 – April 14, 2018

Capitain Petzel, Berlin

Cortesi Gallery London

here and beyond, 2017. Oil on canvas, 140 × 200 cm (detail). Courtesy: Cortesi Gallery. Photo: Markus Muehlheim, Bildkultur, Bern, Switzerland
Angela Lyn, floating gardens
2 March — 10 May 2018
Opening day 1 March

The Armory Show, New York

8 — 11 March 2018
Booth #306

TEFAF, Showcase
9 — 18 March 2018
Booth S4

41 & 43 Maddox St. Corso di Porta Nuova 46/B Via Frasca 5 www.cortesigallery.com
W1S 2PD London, UK 20121 Milano, IT 6900 Lugano, CH info@cortesigallery.com
 Art Previewed

Previews Jonathan Meese

by Martin Herbert Interview by Ross Simonini
29 44

Under the Paving Stones: Berlin

by John Quin
37

Art Featured

Joan Jonas Tom Burr

Interview by Liam Gillick by Sam Korman
64 80

Irredeemable Form
by Mike Watson
74

page 34 Judith Hopf, Lily’s Laptop (still), 2013, video, 4 min 50 sec. © the artist.
Courtesy the artist, Deborah Schamoni, Munich, and Kaufmann Repetto, Milan & New York

March 2018 23
 Art Reviewed

exhibitions 90 Kathleen White, by Cat Kron

Liz Magor, by Sam Korman
Man Ray, by Jonathan Griffin Dreams of Solentiname, by Jeppe Ugelvig
Tomma Abts, by Mark Prince Survival Research Laboratories, by Aaron Horst
Tino Sehgal, by Oliver Basciano John Bock, by Caroline Elbaor
Sophie Calle, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel
How It’s Made, by Stefanie Hessler books 114
The Electric Comma, by Barbara Casavecchia
Ajay Kurian, by Moritz Scheper Avedon: Something Personal, by Norma Stevens
Evelyn Taocheng Wang, by Dominic van den Boogerd and Steven M.L. Aronson
Otobong Nkanga, by Luke Clancy Interviews on Art, by Robert Storr
Gaylen Gerber, by Mike Watson Calder, The Conquest of Time: The Early Years, 1898–1940, by Jed Perl
Yan Pei-Ming, by Matthew McLean yeah, by Tuli Kupferberg
Larry Achiampong, by Richard Hylton
Aaron Angell, by James Clegg the strip 118
Rachel Whiteread, by Louise Darblay
Andreas Gursky, by Fi Churchman a curator writes 122
The Land We Live In – The Land We Left Behind, by Gabriel Coxhead

page 96 Daria Martin, Soft Materials (still), 2004,

16mm film, 10 min 30 sec (loop). Courtesy Kadist, Paris & San Francisco

24 ArtReview
 JASON FOX
MARCH 1ST – BEWARE OF DARKNESS
APRIL 7, 2018 ALMINE RECH GALLERY BRUSSELS
2018/19

Chikako Yamashiro
15 March – 28 April 2018

Chim↑Pom
17 May – 7 July 2018

Aki Sasamoto
18 July – 4 August 2018

Taro Izumi
6 September – 10 November 2018

Meiro Koizumi
22 November 2018 – 12 January 2019

Mari Katayama
24 January – 2 March 2019

47 Mortimer Street white-rainbow.art

London W1W 8HJ +44 207 637 1050
Chikako Yamashiro, Seaweed Woman (2008). © Chikako Yamashiro, Courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.
 Art Previewed

Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea

27

Affiliated with California’s neosurrealist
assemblage scene from the 1950s onwards
but a mystic-minded outrider even there,
1 Bruce Conner was determinedly elusive
in life. He announced his own death twice,
officially renounced art in 1999 and earlier
operated under aliases including Emily
Feather, bombhead and the Dennis Hopper
One Man Show. Conner was also, as his recent
resurrection within the artworld reflects,
something of a visionary. He was a mocker
of authorship who pseudonymously exhibited
nineteenth-century engravings; his 1966 film
Breakaway, featuring hyperactive dancing by
Toni Basil, is considered the first music video;
his 1975 Crossroads, 37 minutes of slow-motion
1 Bruce Conner, Breakaway (still), 1966, 16mm film transferred to video, b/w, sound, 5 min.
© Conner Family Trust, San Francisco. Courtesy Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles
Previewed
footage (soundtracked in part by Terry Riley)
of the 1946 nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, remains
bleakly mesmeric and is hardly his only film
made from purloined imagery. A transforma-
tive out-of-body experience Conner had aged
eleven gives its title to Bruce Conner: Out of Body,
which focuses on his films but also includes
photographs and works on paper, and which,
as the artist might well have liked, you’ll
venture to the Philippines to see.
2 Another adept of wilful difficulty, Lee
Lozano is best known for quitting the art-
world – she began Dropout Piece (1972) a year
after she’d stopped speaking to women, also
in the name of art – and staying quit until her
death in the same year Conner announced his
March 2018
retirement. But she was a supremely incisive
and shapeshifting figure while remaining ‘in’,
from her fluidly sexualised semiabstract
canvases of the early 1960s through the more
familiar, greyscale ‘Tool’ images that followed,
with their overtones of gender inequality (and
their origins in Lozano’s move to a studio
ringed by industrial workshops). Her subse-
quent handwritten, conceptual instruction
pieces, meanwhile, recorded bold experiments
with drugs and unusual rules for social life.
The show at Fruitmarket Gallery, anchored by
four huge mid-60s paintings, covers the key
phases of Lozano’s inquiry into containment
and freedom, and brings to light previously
unseen materials from the archives.
2 Page from Lee Lozano’s notes and
ephemera, undated. © the estate of the artist.
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, London
29
3 Rising star Hardeep Pandhal has cornered
the market in combining animation-driven,
rap-soundtracked videos with presentations
of hand-knitted woollen jumpers. The backstory
to these is cultural dislocation: Birmingham-
born, Pandhal is a British Sikh who doesn’t
speak the same language as his Punjabi mother,
and making the clothes creates a bond. This is
also work that balances a traditionally nonmas-
culine activity with the embroidered faces
of American rap stars, and a darkly satirical
approach to the relationship between structural
racism and misogyny also underpins Pandhal’s
animations. So, too, do heterodox sources:
for example, the new work Pool Party Pilot Episode
(2018, showing simultaneously in the New
Museum Triennial) explores male fears of their
environment, drawing on Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s 1915 novel Herland, involving an all-
women society where conception happens via
parthenogenesis, and Elaine Morgan’s aquatic
ape hypothesis, which recasts evolutionary
theory by focusing on the female body.
4 Vittorio Brodmann’s last gallery exhibi-
tion was titled Legs All Water, which figures:
the Swiss-born painter builds his chromatic,
flowing, instinctively composed figurations
on structural liquidity. In his older canvases,
faces and bodies dissolve into each other,
social anxiety and claustrophobia and pleasure
implicitly melding; more recently, Brodmann
has liquefied his aesthetic further. Contours
melt as the artist picks up acrylic, gouache and
charcoal rather than oils, his figures becoming
misty hints and colours phasing into watery
pastel that should suit this latest show’s Los
Angeles context nicely. Brodmann’s art, which
fuses soft lyrical abstraction, Surrealism and
echoes of cartoons, perhaps ought to be anachro-
nistic in an increasingly dematerialised reality.
But, via old-school media, he catches something
of the texture of our moment – the sense of
entering, or even being outside of, a perpetual
flow of fragmentary information – without
being wearyingly doctrinaire about it.

3 Hardeep Pandhal, Pakiveli Mixtape Cover Art, 2017, India ink, gouache, chalk,
wood, enamel, 44 × 36 × 2 cm. Courtesy the artist

4 Vittorio Brodmann, Again, 2017, watercolour, acrylic, oil,

lacqer and charcoal on canvas, 200 × 170 cm. Courtesy the artist
and Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles & Paris

30 ArtReview
 6 Michael Raedecker, public, 2017, acrylic, transfer and thread on canvas, 158 × 224 cm.
© the artist. Courtesy the artist and Grimm, Amsterdam & New York

5 Mathilde Rosier, Blind Swim 14, 2016–17,

oil on canvas, 200 × 110 cm. Courtesy the artist
and Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan

Shuttling between painting, set design-like
sculpture, video and performative elements,
5 Mathilde Rosier nevertheless regularly stalks
a line between reality and warped fairytales.
In the French artist’s light-touch paintings,
humans merge with animals, or sprout abstract
protuberances. Over the last couple of decades
Rosier has built more angles on her oeuvre,
though as if while forever inhabiting another
time: resembling childhood, but conveying
no safe return to its certainties. In Rosier’s last
Milan show, dancers spun both in drawings and
on video; painted heads became conches. From
what we’ve seen, in the current one the emphasis
appears again on painting, with balletic legs en
pointe emerging unnervingly from skirts-
cum-shells and the consistency of the artist’s
concerns signalling ongoing private compulsion. though, is that he’s endlessly removed from
Another painter who refuses to just paint,
6 Michael Raedecker has salient reasons:
in a recent interview he pointed out that his
trademark use of embroidery places him right
up against the canvas, whereas painting keeps
the artist a brush’s length away. The distinction
might seem odd were it not for how deeply the
Dutch painter, long since resettled in London,
inhabits his work: his motifs of ominous-
looking houses and interiors, often in moody
hues of blue and grey, always seem to arise from
psychological unsettlement that Raedecker
is working out on canvas. If he never fully knows
what he’s returning to, nor can we; what’s clear,
closure with his work in formal terms, balancing
comforting familiarity with some unexpected
new twist (spacious, near-abstract composi-
tional reduction; portraiture; a combinatory
approach to his motifs). Even in coming back
to the Netherlands for this show, you suspect
Raedecker won’t feel to have reached home.
Pakistan’s first major presentation of
7 contemporary art, the 1st Lahore Biennale,
has faced a rocky road to realisation. After some
pre-events were launched in 2016 and an open
call for submissions was announced in early

March 2018 31
 8 Carissa Rodriguez, The Maid, 2017, production still. Courtesy the artist

9 T.J. Wilcox, The Funeral of Marlene Dietrich, 2017, Duratrans print on lightbox,
115 × 153 cm. Courtesy the artist and vnh Gallery, Paris

2017, later last year the inaugural artistic
director, Rashid Rana, announced that he
was stepping down after differences of opinion
with the biennale’s foundation. By December,
though, the event was back on the rails, with
noted Pakistani academics, novelists and archi-
tects joining the advisory committee. At the time
of writing, it’s still on, albeit with no artist list
announced and the organisation still looking
to hire ‘designers’. Fingers crossed, as the bien-
nale’s goal – establishing Pakistan as a known
site of contemporary art production – is perhaps
unlikely to go ahead swiftly otherwise.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a multitasking
artist who directed the collectively authored
8 fictional gallery Reena Spaulings, Carissa
Rodriguez dwells on infrastructural concerns:
the mechanics of art’s distribution, presentation,
valuation. Opposed to creating ‘signature
objects’, she tends to favour antiauratic remove
and, more recently, veer pointedly about:
previous shows have involved photos of her
own work in private collections, more recently,
a project about how the ostensible transforma-
tion of the Bay Area relates to technology and
creativity. In Rodriguez’s first New York museum and a 360-degree panorama of the view from
show, and similarly to how a 2013 exhibition took
its cues from La Collectionneuse, a 1967 film related
to art by Éric Rohmer, her new work The Maid
takes a cinematic approach to sculpture,
considering ‘the conditional relationships
between artist, artwork, and third-party agents
(institution, caregiver, surrogate) in familial
terms’: the evolved social dynamics of the
9 artworld, and the laws that underpin them.
We like to check in on T. J. Wilcox every
few years, because he’s usually doing something
unexpected, even while favouring 8mm and
16mm film. He’s made, for example, tender and
poetic collagelike studies of historical figures
his Manhattan studio (In the Air, 2013) relating
to nineteenth-century ‘cinema in the round’
presentations. As for pointers towards what
he’ll do here, his last London show, at Sadie

32 ArtReview
ANTOINE ERTASKIRAN 1892 RUE PAYETTE, MONTRÉAL CANADA +1 514 989 7886 ANTOINEERTASKIRAN.COM
 Coles hq , in 2017, suggested his retrospective
gaze was turning somewhat on himself, and on
his plush connections: it included a film from
1998 concerning the English aesthete Stephen
Tennant (as considered by his great-niece, model
Stella Tennant), plus filmic portraits of fabled
London chef Fergus Henderson and New York
jeweller John Reinhold, the former filmed in
Scotland, the latter built on dozens of hours of
telephone conversations and interjections by
Debbie Harry and Marc Jacobs.
10 Five years ago Judith Hopf cast a small
flock of concrete sheep from home-moving
1 Bruce Conner
Bellas Artes Projects, Manila
24 February – 24 May
2 Lee Lozano
The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
10 March – 3 June
3 Hardeep Pandhal
Cubitt, London
through 8 April
34
boxes, completing them with sticklike legs and
cartoonish faces. The unspoken word hanging
over Flock of Sheep (2013), perhaps inevitably,
was ‘sheeple’, given its precising of human
acquiescence to relocating wherever, suckered
by neoliberalism’s lauding of mobility. As such
and also for their downbeat humour and
empathy, Hopf’s blocky ruminants exemplify
the Karlsruhe-born artist’s practice, which since
the 1990s has tracked contemporary society’s
homogenising demands on body and soul.
This institutional show in her adopted city,
Berlin, leans on her pivotal series of perverse
10 Judith Hopf, up, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Luca Meneghel. Courtesy Museum
of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano
4 Vittorio Brodmann
Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles
4 March – 21 April
5 Mathilde Rosier
Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan
14 March – 5 May
6 Michael Raedecker
Grimm, Amsterdam
10 March – 14 April
7 1st Lahore Biennale
18–31 March
ArtReview
red-brick works, cemented and then sanded
into the shape of hands, feet, basketballs,
suitcases, robots and more – though these
evocations of pliant malleability here occupy,
we’re told, ‘an intermediary position that
fluctuates between sculpture and (exhibition)
architecture’. Expect, too, some of Hopf’s laptop
sculptures – angular, recumbent, semifigura-
tive geometric sculptures from whose midpoint
a screenlike shape pokes up, body and machine
fused – plus a new film and a commission for
kw’s facade. We’d say go along; but hey, you’re
not sheep. Martin Herbert
8 Carissa Rodriguez
Sculpture Center, New York
through 2 April
9 T.J. Wilcox
vnh Gallery, Paris
15 March – 28 April
10 Judith Hopf
kw Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
through 15 April
Angel
VergArA
Axel Vervoordt Gallery participating at The Armory Show
with a solo show of Angel Vergara

March 8 – 11, 2018, stand 505

Axel VerVoordt GAllery

www.axelvervoordtgallery.com
Lygia Pape:
Ttéia 1,C
2.2–13.5 2018

Lygia Pape, Ttéia 1,C, 2003/2012 © Projeto Lygia Pape, courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Paula Pape.
 Under the Paving Stones

In Berlin, forever changes

words and images by John Quin

the federal elections of 2017: the left still controls what was East Berlin,
the centre-right the West. Apart from voters in the outer eastern suburbs,
nearly everyone here regards the far-right Alternative für Deutschland
as beyond the pale. Berlin’s concerns are different; it is not Germany
in the same way that London is not Brexit Britain and New York City
is not Trump’s America. But if the politics have remained fundamentally
unaltered, the city’s infrastructure is in permanent flux. Berlin is persis-
tently, as Karl Scheffler wrote in Berlin – The Fate of a City (1910), a place
‘condemned always to be becoming but never to be’. The Wall is gone,
but cranes remain ubiquitous. Currently under construction, there’s the
new U-Bahn extension (U5) buried beneath Unter den Linden and the
Rem Koolhaas-designed hq for press giant Axel Springer. These days
the city isn’t the ‘poor-but-sexy’ art factory so beloved of groovy ex-mayor
Klaus Wowereit. There’s money now, as evidenced in the enormous con-
verted bunker where the grandiloquent Boros Collection resides. But
what about the smaller galleries, those fabled gems, sharp as diamonds,
in which the facets of the cutting edge were constantly polished?

top The after party

above Future Axel Springer hq , under construction on Unter den Linden

Construction time again

The streets remain a sump in the aftermath of psychotic pyrotechnical

New Year’s celebrations. Spent rockets like discarded cigar stubs litter the
pavements along with shards of smashed glass. Empty green bottles of
yellow-labelled Veuve Clicquot rest beside old statues of Marx and Engels:
the markers of ideological opposites sitting together in an uneasy truce.
The Berlin Wall, astonishingly, has now been down for a longer time than
it was up. More than 28 years have passed since the 155km Antifaschistischer
Schutzwall – the so-called Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart – separated
the city into two halves. So what has changed? Everything and nothing.
Gentrification means there are fewer buildings pockmarked with
shrapnel wounds, but look at the electoral map of the city following above Jarosław Kozłowski’s Green Wall, 1982/2017, at Zak/Branicka

March 2018 37
 Eastern promise

Little remains of the old Wohnzimmer – ‘living-room’ – scene of the early

1990s. This centred on Auguststrasse, now upscale, as slick as the tango
dancers at Clärchens Ballhaus. As part of the Boros effect, there are affluent
collector depots, such as Me Collectors Room, home to Thomas Olbricht’s
hoard. Olbricht, an endocrinologist, has a broad collection spanning
genres and epochs that includes a selection of contemporary German
greats such as Gerhard Richter and Thomas Demand. Currently on show
is a terrific loan from the National Gallery of Australia that chimes with
his eclectic treasury – a selection of works by indigenous peoples. Gifted
colourists abound here, such as the late Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri,
whose Untitled (Rain Dreaming at Nyunmanu) (1994) has the dizzyingly
optical impact of a Bridget Riley or Chris Ofili. Up the road is Pauly Saal,
a restaurant favoured by the local art crowd, with Murano chandeliers
and sculptures by Daniel Richter and Cosima von Bonin.
All of this a far cry from the days when Leipzig’s Gerd Harry Lybke
opened his then modest Eigen + Art outpost on this street. At kw Institute above Detail of a wall weaving by Andreas Eriksson, at Neugerriemschneider
for Contemporary Art, Lucy Skaer uses high-production values to create below Jill Mulleady, Self Portrait, 2017, at Galerie Neu
sculptures that reference medieval hunting scenes, as with La Chasse (2017).
Elsewhere there are Moroccan rugs and interlinked tables in One Remove
(2016), a work that, we learn, responds to the abstract qualities of Virginia
Woolf’s novel The Waves (1931) – which makes one fear that Auguststrasse
might smugly mutate into a twee outpost of Bloomsbury. Parallel, on
Linienstrasse, is Neugerriemschneider and the large linen wall-weavings
of Andreas Eriksson, among them Weissensee no1 (2017). The woody browns
evoke the Swedish forest; laboriously constructed, they imply serious

northern graft. Up the street you buzz your way into a Hof where an old
ddr block now serves as Galerie Neu. Here there’s a typically cryptic group
show called in search of characters… inspired by artist Philippe Thomas and
his exhibition at New York’s Cable Gallery in 1987. Imagine a corporate
agency that flogs furniture as readymades. One of Klara Lidén’s trash-
aesthetic constructions is included, a Styrofoam sofa – Untitled (Quando
in Roma) (2017). Here too is a memorable oil painting by Jill Mulleady,
Self Portrait (2017), an angry slice of pained Woolfean domesticity showing
a kitchen sink stuffed with things needing a wash-up, plus a pink rubber
glove, a green scouring brush.

The landscape is changing

above Ahmet Öğüt’s The Swinging Doors, Germany Edition, 2009, at kow
Near Rosenthaler Platz, which is now a noisy hub of hostels for young
travellers, kow is showing Ahmet Öğüt’s Hotel Résistance, a laconically
smart series of political gestures. There’s a print photo of Angela Davis that
those cool kids can freely walk off with, nodding to Felix Gonzalez-Torres:
Let’s imagine you steal this poster (2016). This is followed by scale models
of houses due for demolition but whose owners have blocked such plans,
as with Pleasure Places of All Kinds, Zurich (2017) – a four-storey building with
typical Swiss gables isolated on a mound of earth, surrounded by excava-
tions. The videoworks downstairs are accessed through The Swinging Doors,
Germany Edition (2009), a gate made from police riot-shields.

38 ArtReview
 On the broad expanse of Karl-Marx-Allee is Capitain Petzel. Here,
where Russian tanks once parked (replaced today by furniture outlets like
Bo Concept), is Stephen Prina’s As He Remembered It, a show inspired by
memories of a storefront at night in Los Angeles. Another fake showroom
interior, then; another jibe at materialism made with manicured materials.
Shiny, pink, planklike objects recall John McCracken. Berlin’s artworld
now seems obsessed with the West’s decline and fall as seen through
the prism of consumer excess. Just off Unter den Linden is the Schinkel
Pavillon, where there are two displays. Oliver Laric’s Panoramafreiheit
features work based on Max Klinger’s imperious Beethoven monument
(1902). Laric has constructed his tribute out of 17 separate 3d-printed
components. They look oddly like those Chinese ice-sculptures from
the festival held every winter in Harbin. Prepared to distrust the other
show at the Schinkel, of Eliza Douglas’s paintings (given the hype
surrounding her collaborations with Anne Imhof), I was in fact tickled
by it. In Old Tissues Filled with Tears, Douglas, with her scatter of disarticu-
lated arms and a delirious Cookie Monster, succeeds in lightly amusing.

top Entrance to Schinkel Pavillon

above Oliver Laric’s Panoramafreiheit, 2017, at the Schinkel Pavillon

above Reproduction Hohenzollern Palace, under construction

below Stephen Prina’s As He Remembered It, 2017, at Capitain Petzel

The Brits (and Belgians) are coming

Round the corner, the former Palast der Republik is just a memory, while
the Hohenzollern Palace is being rebuilt and awaits Neil MacGregor’s
tutelage. On Museum Island there is a new Pergamon entrance being
completed, but the city is asking, with increasing desperation: is there
enough money to finish the renovation job? That evening we take in a
dance event at the Volksbühne under its new boss, ex-Tate Modern director
Chris Dercon. Fears that the radical line favoured previously at the venue
will be ditched for a more mainstream approach may prove justified if the
ropey performance of Jerôme Bel’s The show must go on was anything to go
by. A bloke at the foot of the stage sticks pop songs on a cd player. We get
Every Breath You Take (1983) by The Police while a line of ‘dancers’ stand
still and stare at us. I imagine that the avid theatre-lovers of the East
are keeping a beady eye on Dercon. They’re thinking: I’ll be watching you.

By the Wall

Nothing symbolises persistent tension in Berlin as does the junction

of Axel-Springer-Strasse and Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse. The Springer

40 ArtReview
 The West is the best?

After many years of mouldering, West Berlin is staging something

of a comeback. Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin has re-relocated to
Charlottenburg. The photography gallery c/o has also moved from
the East and is now at the Amerika Haus, hard by Zoo Station. Here Joel
Meyerowitz’s photographs remind us that America’s best days may be
past. And at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, a revisionist show (comprising
as much documentation as artworks) on the Cold War period reminds us
of the city’s schismatic inheritance, and sticks it to the cia for its (massive
and global) interference in the arts. Finding Edition Block is a challenge
– the opening of K.P. Brehmer’s retrospective prodding at capitalist
realism involves the intriguing sight of gallerist and supermarket heir
Alex Sainsbury singing the praises of the late Mark Fisher. There’s still
old money here in Charlottenburg, with its gleaming cafés named after
George Grosz, the locals indifferent to his scabrous Weltanschauung.
The Wall is long gone, but the city still tries to make sense of its mutability.
Michael Hoffmann’s new translation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz
(1929), with its theme of urban metamorphosis, is therefore most timely.

John Quin is a writer based in Brighton and Berlin

top Cognitive dissonance at the junction of Axel-Springer-Strasse

and Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse
above Isa Genzken’s Nefertiti, part of her Issie Energie,
2017, at König Galerie

newssheets were said to encourage the targeting of the student movement

leader Dutschke before he was shot in 1968. The rightwing press conglom-
erate wallows in its hollow victory with its aforementioned extension
opposite the brilliantly elegant curves of Erich Mendelsohn’s Mosse
above Suzanne Treister’s 30-work commission
building. Across the road at Zak/Branicka is Jarosław Kozłowski’s Green
for Parapolitics, 2017, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt
Wall (1982/2017) – a polemical work, particularly when sited hard by the below Welcome to Jerusalem, 2017, at the Jewish Museum
old Wall and the Springer empire. The artist’s News Games (2014), appropri-
ately located in the press district, is a line of 17 bags of yesterday’s papers
brightened by splatterings of paint in all the colours of the rainbow.
Further along Lindenstrasse, the Jewish Museum has a large green road
sign at its entrance announcing, confusingly, Welcome to Jerusalem. This
proves to be a brilliantly balanced exhibition about the city, and a real
curatorial gamble given Trump’s recent pronouncement on its status as
capital of Israel. Yael Bartana’s video Inferno (2013) dramatises the destruc-
tion of the temple (specifically that of Solomon, in São Paulo) and finishes
the show with a hard slap of sobriety. At the Berlinische Galerie, Jeanne
Mammen’s pungently decadent Weimar drawings square off against
the leather-clad sculptural shenanigans of Monica Bonvicini; the latter
artist gets spanked. Over in the brutalist church space of König Galerie,
Isa Genzken shows more of her showroom dummy mutations. More
sneering at shopping, then, this time costarring one of the artist’s familiar
copies of the Pergamon’s Nefertiti, here looking glam in shades.

42 ArtReview
Eduardo Paolozzi, Pop Art Redefined (Lots of Pictures – Lots of Fun), Detail, 1971 © Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation, Licensed by/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018

Eduardo Paolozzi, Pop Art Redefined (Lots of Pictures – Lots of Fun), Ausschnitt, 1971 © Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation, Licensed by/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018

09.02.–28.05.2018
09.02.–28.05.2018

EDUARDO
EDUARDO PAOLOZZI
PAOLOZZI LOTS OF
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– LOTS OFFUN
FUN
Berlinische Galerie,
Berlinische AlteAlte
Galerie, Jakobstraße
Jakobstraße124–128,
124–128, 10969 Berlin,Mi–Mo
10969 Berlin, Wed–Mon 10am–6pm
10–18h (Tue closed)
(Di geschlossen)
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#EduardoPaolozziBG, #berlinischegalerie, www.berlinischegalerie.de

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 Interview

Jonathan Meese
“I am suffering from reality, not Art”
by Ross Simonini

Jonathan Meese with his mother, 2017.

Photo: Jan Bauer. Courtesy the artist

44 ArtReview
 An excerpt from Jonathan Meese’s correspondence with
Ross Simonini for this interview. Courtesy Jonathan Meese

March 2018 45
Jonathan Meese usually refers to himself in the
third person, as if he were a character in the wild
and tumultuous opera of his art. He is, of course,
the protagonist, but there are plenty of supporting
roles: Wagner, Hitler, Napoleon, Nero, Nietzsche
and an ever-present, ever-erect phallus.
Through sculptures, paintings, perfor-
mances, videos and writing, the Berlin- and
Hamburg-based Meese has built a nightmarish
world of power-hungry European men. It’s a
place of crude, juvenile figuration and German
military iconography. In Meese’s paintings,
which are at the centre of his work, colours smear
and simmer together in an energetic maelstrom
that is both brutal and chromatically stunning.
For the artist, his entire project is one great
deadpan farce. Meese is aggressively reappropri-
ating the propaganda of the oppressor, draining
any power that its language or imagery may hold.
In this way, he sees his work as a denouncement
of all ideology, political, religious or otherwise.
He’s creating a visual manifesto of antiauthority,
of true uninhibited freedom. He wants to be like
an adolescent rolling around in the mud, and
so it seems right that, for many years, his mother
has served as his studio assistant.
To break down the systematic thinking
around him, Meese embraces contradiction.
In his ‘dictatorship of art’ he is not the dictator
– art is – but the agitator, the trickster, the
spectacle. During performances, he has worn
a bicorne, fellated an alien doll and given the
Nazi salute, an illegal act in Germany for
which Meese was tried and acquitted in 2013.
(‘Art has triumphed!’ he said in response.)
In February 2017 he called Donald Trump
‘the greatest performer on this planet right now,
second only to myself’, a statement that manages
to simultaneously mock and embody megalo-
mania. His work is unabashedly slathered with
his own image, and yet he is never the hero,
always the fool.
Meese’s critique of German history is potent,
but he’s also provincial in his interests. His paint-
ing clearly emerges out of German traditions,
from the Expressionism of Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner and Emil Nolde to the New Fauves
of the 1980s, and many of the artists working
in this same lineage – Jörg Immendorff, Albert
Oehlen, Daniel Richter and Tal R – have been
his regular collaborators. If Meese has an
ultimate goal, it seems to be the long-sought
German one: the totalised, multidisciplinary
artwork, the Gesamtkunstwerk.
For the following interview, I emailed
questions and he responded in scrawled
responses, mostly legible. The handwritten
text, often stylised in all caps and punctuated
by exclamation marks, echoed the same
statements squeezed from paint tubes onto
his paintings. In videos of the artist, he speaks
46
mostly at the top of his lungs, and even on paper
he seems to be overflowing with the vehemence
of a child playing an imaginary game of war.
ross simonini How do you define ideology?
jonathan meese Ideology is an invention
of adult brains. Ideology is taste, not necessity.
In nature there is no ideology. Children have
no ideology. Objects have no ideology. Ideology
is something that children are taught. Animals
have no ideology, ideology seems to be only
a need for adults. Every political system is
ideological, so is religion, spiritualism, esoteric
or self-fulfilment. Ideology consists of institu-
tionalised thinking and behaviour. Ideology
is always a devil circle of unnecessary activities.
Ideology is never Art. Art is always totally free
and absolutely contrary to ideological stupidity.
Ideology is the worst obstacle against the future.
Art destroys all ideologies. Art is the leader.
“Art is the future. Art is the
room of future. Artists should
work in their ateliers without
disturbances. Artists should be
hermetic! Artists should only
trust in Art, not policies. Art
is not another political system,
Art is stronger than all politicians.
Art is no anarchy. Art is Total
Order. Art is the Total Order
of the future. Art is the most
radical future! (Art is Total
Love. Art is Total Respect)”
Art overcomes all ideologies. Art says no to
all politicians. Art rules. Art leads and Art takes
over! The ‘dictatorship of Art’ is the leadership
of evolution: ideology is always the enemy
of evolution. Art is the sum of all evolutions.
rs But do you think people can truly escape ideology?
jm Jonathan Meese has always successfully
escaped ideology by playing. Playing like a child
is the answer to all ideological influences. An
artist has to play away all ideological indoctrina-
tion. Artists have to keep away from all ideolog-
ical terror. Ideology is always the room of fear.
Artists have to stay away from fear or even have
to destroy these cynical rooms. In Art censor-
ship is forbidden, especially self-censorship.
Obedience to ideological concepts is deadly
for art. Art is the future. Art is the room of
future. Artists should work in their ateliers
without disturbances. Artists should be
hermetic! Artists should only trust in Art,
ArtReview
not policies. Art is not another political system,
Art is stronger than all politicians. Art is no
anarchy. Art is Total Order. Art is the Total Order
of the future. Art is the most radical future!
(Art is Total Love. Art is Total Respect.)
rs So isn’t ideology just a natural human state?
jm My mother and I fight daily over this
question. She believes that ideology is inherent
in human life. I think it is not. Children and
babies are already human beings and do not
need ideology… that need comes later. Why?
Ideology seems to be a weapon of adults. These
‘teachers’ hammer ideology into the brains
of the young, and I don’t accept this. My mother
violently disagrees and thinks that human
beings need ideologies to survive in a hostile
world. She is eighty-seven years old and
experienced a lot of ideological movements.
Jonathan Meese truly awaits a world without
ideologies. That will be the evolutionary step
of total radicalism into a world of total Art.
The ‘dictatorship of Art’ is the guarantee for
survival. Art has no cynical aspects. Art is
always the future. Art is the master.
rs How does working with your mother affect
your process?
jm My mother is a natural authority. I did
not ‘vote’ for her! My mother is chief, chief of
evolution. My mother is not a God! My mother
evolutionises Jonathan! My mother brings order
into my life and my atelier! My mother disagrees
with my visions but in the end she knows that
something new must evolve. Dispute is totally
necessary for future! Art is dispute, not
discourse. Art is mother ‘Earth’.
rs Do you think education is possible without
ideology?
jm Yes. Education itself is never ideological
as long as there is no message, indoctrination
or other political or religious influences! The
education that leads to future allows children
to play and learn without ideology. Ideology
is always the jail of the past. Art is total freedom.
In Art all ideological devil circles are destroyed.
Evolution shows that we are not the masters
but the children of the future. Evolution is the
teacher of Art! Art is the education of nature.
Art is total metabolism! Art is the pressure
of the future. All children are artists. All Art
lovers are Artists. Nature is Art.
rs Why do you capitalise ‘Art’?
jm Art is not God. Art stands above everything
else. Art is the sum of all evolutions. In Art
nobody has to kneel down, nobody has to pray
and nobody has to make a pilgrimage. Art is
no temple. Art is no holy ground.
zukunftssoldat ‘i.’, 2016, oil and acrylic on canvas, 211 × 140 cm.
Photo: Jan Bauer. Courtesy the artist and Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf

March 2018 47
rs So why call it a dictatorship of art? antireality. Art is total future. Art says no to all In these collaborations we are totally even but
nostalgic governments. Artists never trust poli- not democratic. We do what is necessary. In Art,
jm The name ‘dictatorship of Art’ means the
ticians. Artists should never follow ideology! real friendship is needed, but it takes a long
total declaration of total love towards Art.
Artists should work constantly in their ateliers. time to develop. Art is family business! Art is the
Art is like love, like friendship, like future, like
Artists should not believe too much in cultural exchange of respect! In Art you need patience!
mother, like father. Art is therefore not demo-
networking. Artists should love lovely isolation Art is the chain of loners! Daniel Richter, Tal R
cratic but an evolutionary process! Art is, like
in their ateliers. Artists are loners! and Jonathan Meese are children of Art and play
the sun, a dictator, but an objective dictator,
Art. Art is the total game and Artists are toys!
not an ideological one.
“Evolution is the teacher rs Is it true that you refuse to fly to exhibitions?
rs Is visual art well suited to rejecting ideology?
of Art! Art is the education of jm Yes. I don’t want to fly any more because
jm When people play, they serve Art, when
people live in ideological systems and obey nature. Art is total metabolism! I want to slow down, concentrate on my work
in the studio and let the art travel. Art is not the
them, they are against Art. People have to free Art is the pressure of the future. artist. I am not afraid of flying. I just don’t want
themselves from all ideological brainwashing!
Ideology is the enemy of future. Ideological
All children are artists. All Art to be available all the time and everywhere.

persons are brainwashed and brainwashers.
Visual Art, like all Art is the guarantee for
Evolution and Future.
rs Do you think of yourself as working in the lineage
of Joseph Beuys, who declared everyone an artist?
jm Beuys became political in his later years.
He suddenly trusted politics more than Art.
Art is no political party. Art is no politician.
Art survives. Politics vanish. Art is the counter
reality. Art is the dreamland. Art is the
lovers are Artists. Nature is Art”
rs Do you consider yourself a loner? What about your
recent collaborations with Daniel Richter and Tal R?
jm Normally, I am a total loner and love to work
on my own in my studio. Daniel Richter and
Tal R are very, very old and close friends, and
I trust them totally, so cooperation with them
is no problem. We are three captains whose
ships meet occasionally on the high seas of Art.
rs Evolution and future are clearly two key concepts
for you. Evolution is an idea from science, which is
of course its own ideology, and future is a construct.
Aren’t these adult ideas?
jm Future is no problem for babies, animals
or objects. Future seems to be only a problem
for grown-up people, only ideological brains
produce future problems. Children just play
into the future. Future is no ideological construct
for children or objects. Evolution happens

Daniel Richter, Tal R and Jonathan Meese photographed for their group exhibition
The Men Who Fell from Earth, 2017, Holstebro Kunstmuseum.
Photo: Jan Bauer. Courtesy the artist

48 ArtReview
without human interference. The only relevant
question is: do we fear future or look forward
to it? For an artist, future is the chief. An artist
should never fear future. Evolution is Art. Art is
Evolution. Evolution is future. Evolution is not
revolution. We need people who serve evolution,
not revolution. Evolution is not based on
ideology. Revolution is always based on ideology.
Nature needs no revolution. Only adult ideolog-
ical brains produce revolution. Art is number 1!
Art is the law! Art is the sum of all evolutions.
Art is hermetic action. In art you don’t illustrate
nowadays, you play future! Artists should never
react on political day-to-day developments. Art
is stronger than politics. Artists should never
behave like politicians. Artists are baby animals.
Artists are not left- or rightwing! Artists have
no political ideologies. Artists doubt reality.
Artists deny reality. Artists cannot serve reality.
Artists are radical dreamers.
rs Why do you exhibit at all? Why work with the
market or institutions or the Internet? Why not just
play privately in your studio?
jm Jonathan Meese is no monk! To work alone
in your studio does not mean that you are not
mondparsifal beta 9–23 (von einem, der auszog den ‘wagnerianern
des grauens’ das ‘geilstgruseln’ zu erzlehren…), 2017, opera,
connected to the world. I am suffering from
reality, not Art. I fight against all ideologies
because I am not cynical. I am not a religious
prophet. Meese cannot live in the woods just
looking at his own navel. As an Artist you love
Art and Art will change the world and rule the
world. I love the total power Art, I know that
only Art is the government of the future.
I cannot hide away because this would only
be self-fulfilment! Art expands… Art is no
lifestyle. Meese is no prophet but Meese takes
responsibility! Meese sees failure and points
at these wounds. I have to play against all
Art enemies. Art is the most fascinating never-
ending power of all. Art is the perpetual
mobile. Art created everything. Art is the
beginning with no end! Art is total Parsifal.
Art rescues from reality!
rs When did this anti-ideology position begin for you?
jm No ideological adult ever injected the
ideological juice into my brain. Meese’s brain
is too well protected.
rs Why do you wear an all-black Adidas uniform?
Berliner Festspiele. Photo: Jan Bauer. Courtesy the artist
March 2018
jm Meese needs a uniform to protect himself
against reality! I need a totally organised daily
routine to be radical in Art. Everything in my
life is structure, therefore I can totally concen-
trate on welcoming future. My home is my
castle. My home is Art. Your home is Art.
Everybody’s home is Art. We need to be based
in our own homes. Art is as close as the point
of your nose. Art is not far away. Very important!
I wear Adidas because the three stripes frame
the body and protect it. I love Adidas because
it is simple, effective, not so expensive and
practical. ‘Black’ is a very neutral colour and
the opposite of white. White is too holy for me
and too delicate. To wear a kind of Art-Uniform
makes life easy. Artists should be radical in
Art, not in real life. Reality should be banned
and Art should take over. Art is Art!
Work by Jonathan Meese is on view in Always
Trust The Artist, Tim Van Laere Gallery,
Antwerp, through 17 March, and in die
nackteste freiheit der kunst,
Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf, 14 April – 12 May
Ross Simonini is an artist, writer and musician
based in Northern California
49
 National Gallery in Prague, Trade Fair Palace
16. 2. 2018 – 6. 1. 2019 ngprague.cz

KATHARINA
GROSSE Wunderbild
 ON VIEW THROUGH AUG 12

madmuseum.org T HE FU T U R E O F C R AFT IN A S S O C IA T IO N WIT H V IG O G A LLE RY , LO N DO N

2 CO L UMBUS CI R C L E , N Y C V IG O G A LLE RY . C O M • # V IG O G A LLE RY
Major support for Derrick Adams: Sanctuary is provided by Exhibition Chairs Michael and Patti Dweck. Additional support is generously provided by Mike De Paola, Barbara T. Hoffman, Esq., Shari Siadat Loeffler and
Nicholas Loeffler, The Paulsen Family Foundation, Ron and Ann Pizzuti, Barbara and Donald Tober, and George Wein.

Derrick Adams is proudly represented in New York by Tilton Gallery. Community Engagement Partner: The Africa Center
Forthcoming
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 Art Featured

So shall the sea be calm unto you

63
 Joan Jonas meets Liam Gillick

64
65
 preceding pages Reanimation, 2010/2012/2013, mixed-media installation,
dimensions variable. Photo: Thomas Müller. © the artist / above Mirror Piece i, 1969, performance.
Artists Rights Society, New York / dacs, London. Courtesy the artist © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s
and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York & Rome Enterprise, New York & Rome

66 ArtReview
Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll, 1972–73, multimedia
performance. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and
Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York & Rome

March 2018 67
 They Come to Us without a Word (Mirrors), 2015
(installation view, us Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale).
Photo: Moira Ricci. Courtesy the artist

68 ArtReview
Some subjects that Jonas Jonas has touched on
over her 50-year career (in no particular order):
nature, her dog, animism, Japanese Noh theatre,
the moon and the sun, insects, masks (metaphor-
ical and literal), ghosts, landscape, Hopi
mythology, the female body, the female artist,
the nature of presence versus representation,
memory, her home in Cape Breton. Yet the artist
never addressed this diverse range of interests
directly. Instead they are filtered and reflected
back and forth through the wide-ranging media
she deploys, not least performance, drawing,
film, video, sculpture and sound, often together
in a single cacophonous installation. In Mirage,
from 1976, the artist chalk-draws an image of
the sun. She partially rubs it out, transforming
the simple composition into a moon. The artist
performs the same actions live, the blackboards
left in the gallery in which the film of the action
is installed. Over time Jonas has moulded
a visual language that is shamanic, mystical
and ecologically aware in equal measure. Her
us Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, titled
They Come to Us without a Word, took inspiration
from the novels of Icelandic writer Halldór
Laxness and other literary sources similarly
concerned with the spiritual aspects of nature.
As a survey of her work is set to open at Tate
Modern, London, and her influence on younger
generations is acknowledged in her appointment
as a mentor in the Rolex protégé programme,
Jonas spoke with fellow artist Liam Gillick
in New York, who also took her portrait for
the cover of this issue.
liam gillick What’s difficult for some people to
understand with your work is ‘What is a performance?’
and ‘What is an installation?’ In recent works you
sometimes stand to the side of the stage manipulating
objects. So it’s a strange role: like a performer one step
removed. Does it matter that people might not know
the difference between a performance or installation?
Maybe a performance has to have you in it, or maybe
it doesn’t?
joan jonas So far it has. One of the difficulties
in talking about my work is that I am referred to
as a performance artist, and I don’t think it’s the
right descriptive term. Because nobody under-
stands what a performance is today. There are
so many definitions out there that performance
has become a meaningless word in relation to
what I do and what other people do.
lg Well, we are supposed to think it is radical. We are
supposed to think it is good – that’s the recent idea – 
that performance is inherently good. Good and radical.
jj I think of a performance as being live, with
the performer appearing live in front of an
audience. It is one of the underlying structures
and mediums that I work with in combination
with technology and handmade things.
For instance, when I am standing to the side
in those performances and the video projection
is dominating the space while I am working
with the image on the table with a live camera,
what I am really doing is manipulating and
making images, and in a way I am performing
with my hands. So, it is a performance because
I am there, live on the stage. I came out
of a sculptural background.
lg You mean in terms of being in a studio and
thinking, ‘How am I going to make something’,
rather than starting from a theoretical position?
jj Yes. I went to art school but I also studied
art history. So, my concerns and references
have been painting, film, writing, poetry,
prose, literature. So, for me, when I was drawn
to make live performances – inexplicably –
I just couldn’t resist it because I could invent
three-dimensional situations using all the
different mediums: music, movement, visual
elements, drawing…
“When the video projection
is dominating the space while
I am working with the image
on the table with a live camera,
what I am really doing is
manipulating and making
images, and in a way I am
performing with my hands”
lg There have certainly been moments in contempo-
rary art history where the idea was to get rid of stuff.
jj I am not a minimalist. When I started it was
the time of Minimalism, and I had many friends
who were minimalist sculptors and composers,
and Minimalism was the language that inter-
ested me, and I was inspired by it and I learned
a lot from it, but I think the structure was what
I was able to observe and be interested in – how
do you structure something?
lg Yes, there is definitely something in the work like
that. It’s like an invisible structural field – something
to do with timing. And certain forms – like your use
of cones and hoops, and maybe just the edge of the
screen. There is something contained. There is some
kind of geometric presence.
jj Oh definitely, it has to be form: I really
consider how something is formed, how some-
thing is structured. In Minimalism, even when
I saw my first Sol LeWitt show at the Jewish
Museum, I always saw a lot. I imagined
a lot of content and elements beyond these
cube structures.
March 2018
lg I remember seeing Robert Morris’s mirrored cubes
as a child. And I remember the main thing that struck
me – apart from the fact that there were these ‘special’
and ‘extra’ cubes in a gallery – was the view of people’s
legs reflected in them. So, when you use so many points
of reference and different elements in your work, I can’t
tell if that gives a certain freedom or if it hides things.
jj Some people would think it’s about hiding
things, but it’s not at all. When I started doing
my video performances – with the Organic Honey
series [1972] – the first person to propose me for
review was Jonas Mekas, because he came and he
understood it, because it was like film in a way.
Like a live film with video projections, and my
performance was in relation to the technology
of the video. So, I would say also that what
bothers me about being called a performance
artist as the main description is that in parallel
I have always worked with video and other
mediums. It is all a part of my language.
lg It’s not just the framing or the sources that affect
me but this idea that you are editing in real time.
This act of editing interests me. It’s not just the framing
of an idea but the chopping and cutting, breaking
and interrupting.
jj At the same time that I was looking at
contemporary work and studying art history
I was looking at film – going to Anthology Film
Archives [in New York] and a lot of places that
don’t exist any more that were showing film
in the 1960s and 70s. So, the structure of film was
a major part of my thinking and when I was first
making performances and working with time
I thought of film and the idea of the cut and the
edit. It would be disturbing to an audience that
you would suddenly have a cut. Although film
people were not at all disturbed, I would say.
lg So, you were embodying a procedure that is partly
structural and changes the experience as much as the
effect of a large projection might change the mood?
jj It’s like Eisenstein – who is a major influence
on many people, of course – putting one thing
next to another and creating a language that
way, and it is also related to Surrealism and juxta-
posing disparate ideas, objects and images.
lg Coming back to this editing-in-real-time idea.
Even though you can be seen sometimes – especially
when you are standing to the side manipulating objects
for a camera and everything seems very lucid and clear
– as a viewer, one still gets transported. The viewer
doesn’t lose engagement with the event, even though
you are clearly standing there making these things
happen: moving around marbles and other objects,
under a small camera, which are then overlaid on the
screen. If anything, this process heightens a ritualistic
aspect of the work. Are you thinking in terms of timing
and do you change timings between one performance
and another?
69
jj I think of those things of course, and those
things can subtly vary from one performance
to another of the same piece. But in terms of
relating things to ritual, my objects don’t have
a symbolic meaning, whereas they do in spiritual
religions. I was always interested in magic shows
growing up as a child, so when I first started
working, I did think slightly in terms of magic
shows. But I was interested in revealing the
process. There was a Process show at the Whitney
and I really identified with that, because at
the time I thought of my work as revealing
the process as well: revealing all the illusions.
I am showing you how I make it. Right from
the very beginning that was part of my desire.
lg Misdirection is part of being a magician.
jj That’s probably true in my work: there
are several things going on at the same time,
so you miss things. So, everybody has a slightly
different perception.
lg When I was a kid we had a big mirror above the
fireplace and I used to hang upside down and look,
not at myself, but at this doubled world that was upside
down, and I would look to the sides to see if I could see
anyone there who wasn’t in our world but existed only
in this parallel universe. I never looked directly in the
mirror but used a mirror as a way of seeing new worlds.
People always write about your use of mirrors. I am not
sure that people see a reflection in those mirrors. Maybe
they see something else?
jj They have a lot of references, you know.
But when I was making those mirror pieces
I didn’t see individual reflections; I saw how
they changed the space. They altered the
perception of the whole space – that’s what
really interested me when I was working with
those. So, it would be about looking until
things changed in some way. I don’t know if
the audience sees that. Maybe they do. And then
the other thing that interested me is how people
are so uneasy about people watching them as
they view their own reflection: having other
people see that they see themselves.
lg Meaning that if you are sitting side by side in
the audience you might be able to see yourself and
who is sitting next to you, in front or behind you.
jj What you said about hanging upside down
was great. Kind of like a bat.
lg Yes. And it was important that I was interested
not just in reflection but inversion, and I use that still
in work: the phrase reflected and inverted. I haven’t
been able to escape from that feeling: seeing the world
in a mirror I could accept more easily a world that was
upside down. Sometimes in your work the sense of up
and down and back to front is suspended for a bit. The
mirrors and projections play with space and perception.
When you are in a performance are you ‘lost’?
70
jj When I am performing – yes – hopefully.
But not when I am rehearsing. When I am
performing the time just goes – like that.
That’s performance.
lg But your sense of time is not dependent on the
audience, because it is not theatre?
jj No, but I can feel the audience concentrating.
I have done bad performances where you can
feel the audience reacting to that as well. But
there is a reference to theatre.
lg That comes to the question of drawing. When
you were thinking about the question of art – in the
beginning – you were drawing?
jj I was drawing. I had this idea that I had to
‘learn how to draw’.
lg Did anyone teach you how to draw?
jj I had one artist, [the sculptor] Harold Tovish,
in Boston who taught me. He just told me to
follow the contour. That was very good discipline.
“My objects don’t have a
symbolic meaning, whereas
they do in spiritual religions.
I was always interested in magic
shows as a child, so when I first
started working, I did think
slightly in terms of magic
shows. But I was interested
in revealing the process”
lg What a great piece of advice.
jj So that was the only person who taught
me anything about drawing – the rest was trial
and error. For me that was the one discipline
I brought with me from the sculptural –
although I think of my work in terms of three
dimensionality in relation to sculpture, in
relation to space. But with every piece I do, I try
and imagine another way to make a drawing
– in relation to the sculpture and the content.
lg In the end you had three types of drawing at the
us Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015 – in terms
of almost pure drawing: the fish, the Rorschach bees
and then the kites, which were not made by you but
you painted them and put images on them. I can’t tell
if they are a starting point or an endpoint.
jj I am just dedicated to experimenting with
and making drawings as a part of my work
because it is another part of what I am trying
to say – in some way. I don’t know how you
perceive it, but I don’t want to just make video
and performances – I like to have a physical
ArtReview
moment which is making something on
a page, and I like the idea of juxtaposing this
to technology.
lg You said in an interview with Ingrid Schaffner that
when you were making the fish drawings you kept your
eyes on old Japanese illustrations of fish – you were not
looking at your own drawing. You were communing
with another person’s work.
jj That comes from the very beginning
– drawing without looking. Another way of
making a drawing in relation to the monitor.
I would look at a monitor and only look at the
drawing I was making on a monitor. I called
it drawing without looking. And what interests
me about drawing in performance is that the
results are surprising. Something else comes out.
lg A difficult thing to imagine when you are young
is reanimation – metaphysically and literally bringing
things back. Going back to older material and literally
bringing it back to life. Giving it a new context. Tell me
about reanimation in relation to the Tate exhibition.
How do you approach a show like that? There is a lot
of expectation.
jj I have done several shows like this – survey
shows. I make big models. I choose the works
that are most interesting and significant for me
and I go from there. And the curators have their
ideas – which gives another perspective. I am
much more open to that now than I used to be.
This show comes out of a process I have been
involved in since the 70s.
lg So, this survey show at Tate is not contradictory
to your working method – it actually supports it.
jj Well, I have always considered my setups for
performances as stage sets, and in 1976 I had a
show at the ica in Philadelphia titled Stage Sets in
which the central work was composed of objects
and structures from earlier works in a formal
arrangement. This way became more fully devel-
oped in 1994 [for a midcareer survey exhibition]
at the Stedelijk Museum, and since then I have
questioned ‘what is installation?’. The audience
sitting and watching my performance: that’s one
point of view. The audience walking through in
relation to installation: there are many points of
view. I think in terms of rooms. So, what am I
doing? For Tate we chose several larger installa-
tions. Reanimation [2010/2012/2013] will be in one
of the tanks and the other tank will only be
available for the first ten days for the live perfor-
mances, so in that way this is the first show that
has included live performances. I have reintro-
duced my Mirror Piece [1969] just by itself several
times and in this case we are developing the Mirror
Piece indoors while the outdoor works will be
performed on the banks of the Thames at low
tide. We have to adjust the different elements to
this new space. I don’t know how that will work.
They Come to Us without a Word ii, 2015, performance at Teatro Piccolo
Arsenale, Venice. Photo: Moira Ricci. © the artist / Artists
Rights Society, New York / dacs, London

March 2018 71
lg I used to live on the river about a mile downstream
from there. Low tide is surprising. There’s a beach.
jj But it’s very different from the locations
where those works were first performed. I am
also doing a piece called Mirage [1976], which
is a solo. When I re-perform these pieces I don’t
believe you could ever reproduce what had hap-
pened originally. So, they have to be tweaked.
And then there’s my age, of course, and what
are people looking at? They are saying, “What’s
that older woman doing?” Things like that.
But Jason Moran and I are performing an
improvised duet. I enjoy this work.
lg The Tate is still the Tate. It’s still a museum.
They don’t always do big complicated installations.
They don’t always do performances on the river. Like
all museums they worry a lot about the public. So
how do you deal with this question of interpretation
and mediation? Do you get involved?
jj As you know, my work cannot be experienced
well in photographs and writings. It’s impos-
sible. So, I am used to the fact that some people
get it and some people don’t. What can I do?
I don’t have any control over that. If I worried
about that, I would get even less sleep than
I already do. I try my best to communicate
my ideas, my vision to the audience.
lg I like to be involved in the mediation of the work.
Sometimes I want more and sometimes less – it depends.
Since 1994 there have been several moments or big
steps in the work, so you must be used to these limits
or possibilities.
72
jj When I did the Stedelijk show in 1994, people
I knew in Amsterdam said, “You are missing
from this, you know”. But that’s disappeared
– I am much more present.
lg I want to ask about working in an ensemble.
You basically work alone?
jj I am the director and the conceiver. And right
from the beginning I did all the camerawork
– except for a couple of times when I have hired
a camera team. For example, in Venice I hired
camera people because I couldn’t do it, and direct
it, and film the whole thing myself. Also, the
video backgrounds with children performing
in them had to be recorded by professionals with
better cameras. You could say I try and oversee
everything. I work with a video editor because
I don’t want to learn that technology any more
– it has become too complicated for me.
lg It’s a rabbit hole. Because once you get into
it, you look for increasingly easy techniques.
Modern video editing ‘facilitates’. You see too much
information – in a timeline.
jj I work with the editor. I sit there. I have an
assistant who is a really good editor who I trust.
lg That comes around to the question of timing – the
time of the performance. Of course, I always think that
you are a contradiction that disproves a rule. We are told
that technology is something that works increasingly
fast and makes everything shallow and empty, and even
alienating, yet you have always been an early adopter
of certain technologies, and this doesn’t seem to have
an entirely negative effect. Tiny cameras now, Portapaks
ArtReview
early on. I am trying to move away from talking about
mirrors and water and shamanic activity and stories
from Iceland.
jj None of those things would be interesting
without the structure and relation – not just
to technology – but a way of visualising things.
So, it’s not just the story – it’s the way the story
is told. It’s the same with everything.
lg I have watched a lot of early videowork by American
artists, sometimes on the original Sony open reels of tape,
and you get the sense that they are thinking, “What am
I going to do with this video camera?” and as a result
they are almost always in the work themselves. They
would maybe set it up in the studio and think, “ok,
now I am going to sing a song”. Now technology has
become more discrete. Do you see a piece of technology
and think – I could really do something with that – 
or do you have an idea and try and find the right kit?
jj I think both of those things. In a way I am
quite an old-fashioned video artist – I am not
working on the Internet. I just saw an early film
of John [Baldessari] where he is painting himself
into the corner of a room.
lg At art school in the early 1980s we had amazing
Panasonic cameras that were really sophisticated.
And I found the spaces where you could use these
cameras were outside the normal time of the studio
tradition. Time was different. The av people or the
people into video weren’t into the traditional artist’s
studio. And they were often hybrid people – they studied
something else or had been filming modern dance
or music videos. They often had a different politics.
Like the London Filmmakers Project – you felt they
were living radicality rather than referring to it.
jj There were always these different video
groups in New York – more political than
the artworld. I knew these people, but I was
in the artworld. I was interested in Bruce
Nauman and so on.
lg There is no vanity in your work. I was thinking
the other day – could I explain clearly what Joan looks
like just from looking at old stills from videos and
performances? And it’s quite a challenge. You are not
merely asserting you exist by taking a photo of yourself.
You become interleaved with stories and narratives
and time. So many artists spend so much time asserting
that they exist, but you have spent many years trying
to dissolve.
jj The radical thing about the Portapak was
that you could sit in your studio and make
things and see it right away. And see yourself.
That was a radical moment, and there hasn’t
been one like it since, except in relation to
the Internet. People now ask me – did you
know you were anticipating the selfie – and
of course not, and no, I don’t think I was.
lg I want to ask you about your relationship with
galleries. The work you were showing looked quite
radical even for Leo Castelli’s programme in the early
1970s. Looking back at photos, it is hard to tell where
the work starts and ends. It is not the same as the
conceptual work he was showing at the time.
jj I remember when Vito [Acconci] first started
performing at Castelli, I went there with people
who were slightly horrified. I liked it because
I could see what he was trying to do. But for
others it was very difficult.
lg It is easy to forget now that performance was an
implicit challenge.
jj Castelli had been showing videos and
collecting them, and there was a whole section
in the back of the gallery. There were different
periods for me. All of a sudden, the cameras got
too expensive in the 1980s. Then I started editing
at night in studios with brilliant editors, and
you overdid it in a way. But then in the 1990s
the cameras got smaller, so in the 1990s things
became much more like documentary. So you
started carrying cameras around with you for
the first time. The Portapak you didn’t carry
around – it was too heavy.
lg Hence the classic Sony name – Portapak. Directly
contradicting its potential.
jj By the 1990s you started recording the things
around you and picking up documentary footage,
and that’s another kind of content that enters
into the work.
lg Performance and installation is resistant to the
standard flow of a gallery. But you have always been
in the artworld.
jj I was always interested to be in that
discussion.
this and facing page
They Come to Us without a Word, 2015,
production stills. Courtesy the artist
March 2018
lg Were there times when you felt it was difficult?
It’s easy to doubt yourself at some point.
jj At the beginning, in the late 1960s and early
1970s, I had the support of all these people
around me who were in the scene. I never felt
alone – also the worlds of dance and video were
dominated by women. And then in the 1980s
I did feel… I think it was mistaken, but I thought
I shouldn’t show in galleries, so I actually
avoided galleries for a while. But I kept working
and kept showing, but not in the same way.
And in the 1990s I did feel I had to kind of fight
my way back. But I always had the support
of other artists.
lg Is there anything that is getting left out of the
current discussion about your work? Are there any
productive misunderstandings?
jj The focus is sometimes on the pioneer – the
pioneer performance artist. What does the word
pioneer mean? As I said before – narrowing
it down to the word performance creates a big
misunderstanding. It creates nothing, in a way.
It says it is all performance, and with the instal-
lations you are just seeing debris from a
performance. I make a big distinction between
performance debris, installation and what
a pioneer might be today. ar
Joan Jonas is on view at Tate Modern, 14 March
– 5 August, with performances by Jonas included
in the bmw Tate Live Exhibition; the Tate
Modern exhibition will then travel to Haus der
Kunst, Munich, 9 November – 3 March
73
 Irredeemable Form

Is art too polite to fight the far right?

by Mike Watson

Francis Bacon, Crucifixion, 1965, triptych, oil on canvas, 198 × 147 cm (each).
© The Estate of Francis Bacon, all rights reserved / dacs 2018 / bpk
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich

74 ArtReview
Donald Trump’s particular brand of presidential communication of political art offerings, the works of artists such as Tania Bruguera
has allowed him to dominate the cultural conversation globally (who aims to run for Cuban president next year), Theaster Gates (who
ever since he came to power in January 2017. Out of this a number of is busy redeveloping Chicago to provide better facilities to the disad-
heinous cultural trajectories have taken hold, though surely none vantaged) and the art-activist group Artists at Risk (which offers resi-
more disturbing than the reemergence into the public sphere of an dencies to at-risk artists) propose real-world solutions to issues such
incendiary far-right movement, replete with a hardcore element that as immigration, urban poverty and the plight of the stateless, and to
embraces both Nazi aesthetics and racialist policies. artists experiencing the effects of these. Despite these positive exam-
Whether the rise of the ‘alt-right’ represents millennial high- ples, it remains to be seen whether the artworld has the means or the
jinks as the young try to distance themselves from their elders’ ethical appetite to fight a virulent strain of neo-Nazism – though two recent
imperatives, or the powerful reappearance of a dormant political indications suggest not.
archetype, the danger is clear. The normalisation of far-right political Firstly, in August 2017, Documenta responded to public pres-
values and aesthetics risks immunising us to them, deadening our sure in banning Italian theorist and activist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s
reflexes in the face of potential extreme rightwing policy-making at scheduled performance, entitled Auschwitz on the Beach. In the swel-
a governmental level. tering heat of a record-breaking summer, Bifo aimed to take the
The problem is not, of course, confined to the us. Another indi- prescient symbolism of the beach – the favoured destination for
cation of a massive nationalist shift in popular opinion came in the European holidaymakers embarking on their summer breaks – to the
form of the Brexit referendum result art-admiring public in order to chal-
in the uk in 2016. Since then, far-right The artworld’s enthusiasm for a broadly lenge a self-imposed blindness. In a
electoral swings and protests have leftwing ‘political art’ seems to appease statement released by Documenta’s
been seen across Europe, from France artistic director, Adam Szymczyk, it
(where Marine Le Pen took 34 percent
a deep need for a sense of usefulness was announced that the performance
of the final vote in the 2017 presi- in a world that has made much of our would be replaced by a live reading by
dential election), to Austria (where heritage appear without value Bifo of the homonymous poem that
conservative Sebastian Kurz governs inspired the previously scheduled
in a coalition with the Freedom Party of Austria, itself founded by performance, followed by a talk. The evening, entitled ‘Shame on Us’,
former members of the Nazi Party), to Poland (where national inde- which went ahead on 24 August, aimed to, in the words of Szymczyk,
pendence celebrations were marred by white supremacist marches in ‘seriously and responsibly locate the Holocaust as the ultimate border
November last year). reference for the extreme, violent, and systemic injustice perpetuated
As the growth of the far right continues, there appears to be no by national and transnational European institutional bodies toward
diminishment in the artworld’s enthusiasm for a broadly leftwing the physical bodies of the refugees who attempt to flee to Europe…’
‘political art’, also known as ‘social art’, ‘art-activism’ and ‘artivism’. Among critics of the original event, Boris Rhein – minister of
The trend, which has developed without pause since the subprime higher education, research and the arts for Hesse, the state in which
mortgage crisis and subsequent national bank-bailout schemes, Documenta is based – argued that ‘any comparison to the Holocaust
seems to appease in the art audience a deep need and hunger for a cannot be allowed, as the crimes of the Nazis were unique’. While it is
sense of usefulness in a world that has made much of our cultural impossible to disagree with such a sentiment – which points funda-
discourse and heritage appear without value. Within the full range mentally to the difficulty in doing justice via art to the specificity and

March 2018 75
 ‘Unite the Right’ rally, Charlottesville, 12 August 2017.
Licensed under Creative Commons: Anthony Crider

76 ArtReview
A swastika banner briefly on display in the main hall
of Central Saint Martins, London,
15 November 2017. Photo: via social media

March 2018 77
magnitude of the Holocaust as an event – the difficulty in responding institutions and the disproportionate power and influence of large
to the renewed threat of racialist supremacy without recourse to financial interests’ and at no point aimed to ‘give a platform to far
artistic statements should be recognised. It would seem that in the right extremists’.
artworld we are prevented from entering into the fullness of a debate While it is possible to sympathise with the university’s desire to
on the resurgence of a white-supremacist politics by our own recti- head off a social-media backlash against an apparently wayward stu-
tude. On this note it is worth recalling that twentieth-century German dent, the institution’s response to the action, albeit unreservedly
philosopher Theodor Adorno’s famous injunction on the writing of apologetic, has inadequately explained how tutors did not manage to
poetry after Auschwitz was followed with the proviso that we should dissuade the student from his choice on artistic grounds, a point that
continue to try to make art anyhow, as a challenge to the cynicism recalls David Sylvester’s failure to adequately confront Francis Bacon
of the rightwing. While Adorno favoured an abstract art, which was for his depiction of the Nazi swastika on an armband in his 1965
as such able to circumvent the difficulties of directly representing Crucifixion triptych. In the second of the seven interviews conducted
human suffering, he was writing as a survivor of the Holocaust, who by Sylvester and published in Interviews with Francis Bacon 1962–1979
fled his homeland to the uk and then (1980), the painter claimed that he
the United States to avoid persecu- And yet it would seem that merely wanted to ‘break the continuity
tion. As such, Adorno wrote of the best we are prevented from entering into of the arm and to add the colour… You
course of action once all opposition to may say it was a stupid thing to do, but
rightwing racialist tyranny had failed
the fullness of a debate on the it was done entirely as part of trying to
and the worst had already happened. resurgence of a white-supremacist make the figure work – not work on
Today we face the problem of looking politics by our own rectitude the level of interpretation of its being
back to a past that we must do justice to a Nazi, but on the level of its working
while also having at our disposal the full range of available rhetorical formally.’ Here Sylvester missed the opportunity to point out that a
and artistic devices in order to counter the far right. As it stands, the Nazi swastika can never be purely formal, given the weight of asso-
sensitivity of the topic often leaves art professionals and academics ciations attached to it, not least the estimated murder of six million
hamstrung when facing rightwing imagery. European Jews in an effort to eliminate Jewry from all existence. This
On 15 November 2017, The Jewish Chronicle reported that a student is why the symbol will never be merely a symbol and why its frequent
at London’s Central Saint Martins had hung a large swastika banner unchallenged display on Internet forums in close association with
from the railing on the third floor of its central foyer. The article the current us president is cause not only for concern but for intense
went on to state that the piece had been emphatically rejected by the debate and activity within the artworld and academia.
student’s tutor (who remains unnamed) one day prior to its hanging Bacon’s refusal to take responsibility, together with Sylvester’s
and was immediately removed when the university became aware failure to bring him to account, has set a dangerous precedent that
of its display. The image has raised a number of questions about the universities and arts agencies need to challenge. The efforts of
response of the university and the capacity of art to carry the weight Documenta and Central Saint Martins to minimise the damage and
of Nazi symbolism. placate the offence caused by the direct intrusion into the artworld of
My email correspondence with Paul Haywood, dean of academic Nazi symbolism are understandable. Though they point above all to
programmes at Central Saint Martins, has revealed that the student the fact that a large part of the battle – one over the appropriation of
– who the college refuses to name – intended to ‘critique corporate historical symbolism – is already being lost. ar

78 ArtReview
 from left Adam Szymczyk, Paul B. Preciado and Franco ‘Bifo’
Berardi at Documenta 14’s ‘Shame on Us’ evening, 24 August 2017

March 2018 79
 Under Construction

The never-ending renovation of Tom Burr

by Sam Korman

On 14 May 2017, Marcel Breuer’s a sparse installation that, though

Pirelli Building was revived. Elec- limited to the former showroom on
tricity had been restored to the the ground floor, recuperated many
long-empty tower, safety meas- of the artist’s themes in a grand
ures put back in place and permis- self-portrait.
sion to use the space granted by The project was shaped by the
the various powers overseeing the place and times in which the artist
Brutalist landmark in New Haven, was raised. Brutalist Bathroom (2017)
Connecticut. The opening of Tom paired a bathroom door with a
Burr/New Haven (2017), alternatively portrait printed on aluminium of
titled Body/Building, also marked J. Edgar Hoover, first director of the
the eponymous artist’s prodigal fbi and a rumoured crossdresser,
return: the building stands in holding a Tommy gun. Nearby, the
Burr’s hometown. artist had inscribed a set of rail-
Work on this site-specific, ‘evolv- ings with a 1970 speech delivered
ing exhibition’ had begun six by Jean Genet in New Haven (The
months prior, when the artist and his team sought initial approval Railings (May, 1970), 2017) that took as its theme violence against African
from the gods of state and local government, the building’s super- Americans in light of Black Panther-cofounder Bobby Seale’s recent
intendents under the State Register of Historic Places; ikea, which arrest by the city’s police, part of a determined effort by Hoover to
owned it; and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema), destroy the group. An image from Jim Morrison’s arrest on obscenity
whose signature was required because the building stands on a flood- charges while performing at New Haven Arena in 1967 is reproduced
plain. In the end, Burr dedicated Phase I: Pre-existing Conditions of the in People Are Strange (touch me) (2017), another aluminium-printed panel
yearlong undertaking to the months of paperwork required to bring leaned against one of the storefront’s signature elongated windows.
the corporate headquarters of first the Armstrong Rubber Company Laid on the ground beside a dusty section of floor tile is Cubicle (2017),
and then Pirelli back to life. a portrait of Anni Albers, who lived in New Haven when her husband,
With the transferal of responsibility for Breuer’s edifice to Burr Josef, was employed by Yale University, next to an aluminium sheet
(and Bortolami, the gallery that represents him in New York and displaying a textile pattern of her design. All of these historic char-
which sponsored the project), there was also a transferal of energy: acters could be read as heroes, bad boys, villains, role models, idols
the building became a surrogate for the artist. Burr or crushes, and Body/Building had something of the
used the space to examine his life and career through Pirelli Building, New Haven secretive air of a teenager’s bedroom.

80 ArtReview
 Brutalist Bathroom, 2017, powder-coated steel guardrails,
bathroom doors from Marcel Breuer’s Pirelli Building,
direct-to-substrate print on aluminium, 207 × 633 × 305 cm

March 2018 81
 The Pirelli was completed in 1969, when Burr was six, and this local preoccupation with the symbols of entertainment and the simple
boy would have witnessed how the building’s modular approach, and economy of signage. Other images, such as a murky, untitled, desat-
its aspirations to create a better corporate labour structure through urated photograph from 1995, depict crude, bent-metal forms that
design, failed to arrest the slow decline of the companies it hosted reinforce makeshift security measures. There are no people, and the
and the entire regional economy. New Haven at the end of the 1960s photographs are tightly cropped. That one shows nothing but a sign
and start of the 1970s encapsulated a turbulent period in American for 25-cent peepshows is enough to understand the selling point of
history, and Burr’s representations of that time imbue the exhibition these establishments. That’s not a lot to pay for privacy.
with a poignant sense of loss. Borrowing from forerunners including Robert Smithson and Dan
This loss is figured in intimate as well as macroeconomic terms. Graham, Burr adopted a wry, documentary approach that sought to
Genet, a key figure in the exhibition, unearth the banal ways that power
appears in the prime of his youth was enacted through the city’s built
New Haven at the end of the 1960s and
and as an old man in the diptych Bae environment. ‘Sometimes, it would
Genet / Grey Genet (2017), two portraits start of the 1970s encapsulated a turbulent be about the emptiness of time,’
separated by a urinal divider. The period in American history, and Burr’s Burr said about his afternoons and
khaki trenchcoat, seersucker blazer evenings in Times Square, and partic-
representations of that time imbue the
and loafers displayed on a wooden ularly about his growing interest in
pedestal in Body/Building (local layers) show with a poignant sense of loss the rituals of cruising at the Gaiety,
(2017) would have been a familiar an all-male burlesque that stood on
sight on the upper floors of the Pirelli Building. Plain and neat, they 46th street. His street-view Polaroids suggest that Times Square was
defined the tight-lipped academic chic in this university town. The a nonsite par excellence: he revelled in the mirrored window treat-
garments were gleaned from Burr’s nonagenarian father’s wardrobes, ments, shabby lobbies and video-booths retrofit to the historic thea-
which begs the question: what was he saving them for? tres, and the luxury of anonymity that they afforded him. Between the
Burr moved to New York in the 1980s, so it made sense to meet immense losses the area suffered from the aids crisis and Giuliani’s
for dinner in Times Square, which the artist described to me as ‘the raid on its character, disappearance was the defining characteristic of
eternal New York’. During the early 1990s he’d spent a lot of time Times Square. It stood as a living ruin.
here, in a neighbourhood threatened by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s Many artists shared Burr’s documentary impulse to record what
‘quality of life’ policies. A series of Polaroids, 42nd Street Structures, he describes, in his essay ‘Sleazy City: 42nd Street Structures and Some
catalogues the area’s porn and burlesque theatres and exhibits Burr’s Qualities of Life’ (1998), as public spaces, in that ‘they constitute the

People Are Strange (touch me), 2017, powder-coated steel guard rails,
direct-to-substrate, print on aluminium, 91 × 184 × 164 cm

82 ArtReview
Bae Genet / Grey Genet, 2017, powder-coated steel guardrails, urinal,
partition from Marcel Breuer’s Pirelli Building, direct-to-substrate
print on aluminium, 122 × 419 × 305 cm

March 2018 83
 The Railings (May, 1970), 2017, blackened steel, polished
steel etched with Jean Genet’s 1970 ‘May Day Speech’,
tempered glass, 107 × 1372 × 762 cm

84 ArtReview
 Body/Building (local layers), 2017, trench coat, seersucker
blazer and coat hangers belonging to the artist’s father,
metal, clothing rack, wooden pedestal, 175 × 91 × 91 cm

March 2018 85
86 ArtReview
locations for the practice of public sexualities, and publicly accessible Lanes offered another option, given that Burr dressed up the artist’s
sexual culture’. Alvin Baltrop turned his camera on the Chelsea piers legacy of kitsch with pleather-clad daisies in Bitch, Immediately After
during the 1970s, and his archive presents a shared interest in dilapi- Vinyl (2004). But it had closed. By the time we visited, the Times Square
dated buildings and the gay-sex scene that developed around them that Burr knew had been replaced several times over: even Señor Frogs,
(Baltrop even recorded a nude man standing near the aperture cut a franchised party-restaurant beloved of tropical resorts, and Guy’s
at the end of a warehouse by Gordon Matta-Clark for his work Day’s American Kitchen and Bar, a restaurant founded by Jersey-bro celeb-
End, 1975). What industrial buildings and stock infrastructure were rity chef Guy Fieri, which catered to the same Parrothead clientele,
to Robert Smithson’s Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (1967) had recently shuttered. They were as much a part of Times Square’s
and his formulation of the nonsite, the civic architecture of New York post-Bloomberg, pro-development agenda as Snøhetta’s recent rede-
was to Burr’s understanding of the same (the series Unearthing the sign of the area, which magically opened a hectare of Broadway into a
Public Restroom, 1994, for example, documented the stout, neoclassical public plaza. The most visible intervention is a series of benches that
buildings that had become gay hookup sites around the city). Sarah ‘provide a clear orientation device for tourists and locals alike’.
Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind (2012) argues that the aids Burr’s engagement with public spaces has always been counter-
crisis paved the way for New York’s eventual gentrification, not only balanced by autobiography, and much of his work possesses an
in terms of newly available real estate, but also because it decimated inscrutable interiority. The mirrored surfaces of Folding Screen (Yellow)
the culture that might have countered the real estate market’s delete- (2003) and Folding Screen (Pink) (2004) reflect disorienting images of
rious effects. Burr’s documents are pervaded by absence, and he devel- the gallery environment in which they are exhibited; either sick-
oped a language to reevaluate whatever remaining monuments there ening or euphoric, doubling upon themselves, the coloured parti-
were in the course of grappling with this loss. tions also speak to costuming and the interplay of surfaces. His
Whenever my friend Jake sees a crane or scaffolding, he’ll enduring crushes and their importance to his practice are explored
ask, ‘Haven’t they finished this place yet?’ New York is defined by in the essay ‘Make-Up’ (2002), which recounts the object of his affec-
rampant change, and a consider- tions at high school, James, as
ation of places like Times Square There are no people, and the photographs well as discussing more famous
reveals the city to be exemplary models of the creative life, such
of prevailing attitudes to public are tightly cropped. That one shows nothing as Jim Morrison. Dedicated to
space over the last 30 years. Burr but a sign for 25-cent peepshows is enough Truman Capote, the 2005 works
admitted to me that he had not
to understand the selling point of these estab- Worn (For Mr. Capote), Unhinged and
visited the area, except as a pas- Worn Out were each a set of hinged
senger in a crosstown cab, in more lishments. That’s not a lot to pay for privacy panels arranged to resemble a re-
than a decade. Our conversation, clining body, dressed with props
too, confirmed Burr’s nomadic appreciation for New York. His essay similar to those worn by the author late in life: a straw hat, a tie.
‘Eight Renovations: A constellation of sites across Manhattan’ Young, attractive and wearing a piercing expression, Capote had
(1997) traced the disappearing clubs, hookup sites and galleries, been pictured on the cover of Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) leaning
and observed the slow migration from the East Village to Chelsea, against a wall. Burr, though, was aware of the hardship and isolation
a neighbourhood that today boasts some of the world’s highest real endured by this gay icon in middle and old age. ‘And as for Truman,’
estate prices. Many of his sculptures could be considered tracking Burr wrote, ‘I still retain some romantic musings about him, specifi-
devices, mapping (among other things) the sexual politics of public cally the fragility of his character coupled with his pointed insight-
space. For Circa ’77 (1995), the artist recreated a section of Platzspitz fulness.’ It’s indicative of Burr’s relationship to certain cultural
Park in Zürich, a once-popular cruising ground, while Deep Purple figures that the passage refers to Capote personally, by his first name.
(2000) reenvisions Richard Serra’s controversial Tilted Arc (1981) for During the run of Body/Building, from May to November of last
the gardens at Kunstverein Braunschweig. Burr shrunk the design year, Burr made the two-and-a-half-hour drive to New Haven nearly
of Serra’s original sculpture and painted it a sleazy purple. Its seduc- every week to give tours of the exhibition. I visited on the last day
tive surface offers museumgoers a typical minimalist sculpture but, of the project and found the Pirelli Building inundated with people,
standing barely as high as the hedgerows, it also conceals a potential many of whom had, like me, trekked from New York. Burr’s relations
site for furtive sexual encounters. offered recommendations to visitors of local pizza restaurants, and
Our dinner in Times Square came perilously close to happening at the exhibition even drew the attention of James, Burr’s high school
Bubba Gump Shrimp Co, a restaurant franchise spun off from the 1994 crush. His presence infused the installation with a verité realism;
feature film Forrest Gump. The ‘Warhol’s Factory’ room at Bowlmor it suddenly felt like each artwork knew where it belonged. ar

facing page Untitled ( from 42nd Street Structures), all images but page 86
1995, Polaroid photographs, 8 × 8 cm (each). Photo: Jessica Smolinski. Courtesy the artist
Courtesy the artist and Bortolami, New York and Bortolami, New York

March 2018 87
 How to Draw
Taught by Professor David Brody
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
LECTURE TITLES
1. An Introduction to Drawing
TIME O
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12. Proportion: Accurate Proportion and Measure
13. Creating Volume and Illusionistic Space
14. Six Complex Drawing Projects
15. Linear Perspective: Introduction
16. Linear Perspective: The Quad
17. Linear Perspective: The Gridded Room
18. Linear Perspective: Ellipses and Pattern
19. Linear Perspective: Advanced Topics
20. Value: How Artists Use Value
21. Value: Drawing Materials for Value
22. Value: Black and White and a Value Scale
23. Value: Eight Complex Drawing Projects
24. Value: Side Light and Cast Shadow
25. Value: Oblique Light and Cast Shadow
26. Texture: Mark Making and Optical Value
27. Texture: How Artists Use Texture
28. Color: Color Theory and Color and Light
29. Color: How Artists Use Color
30. Color: Color Drawing Projects
31. The Figure: A Canon of Proportions
32. The Figure: The Head, Hands, and Feet
33. The Figure: Artistic Anatomy
34. The Figure: Drawing Projects

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36. Advanced Drawing Projects

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 Art Reviewed

For I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you

89

Gagosian Beverly Hills 11 January – 17 February
There he is, in the corner of the room: a dark,
malevolent presence, glowering at the camera
from under heavy lids, his crazily crooked nose
and uneven eyes lending the photograph a
quasi-Cubist appearance. It was an intense look
that Man Ray often assumed in self-portraits.
(An alternative guise was that of the debonair
dandy, smoking in sharply tailored suits beside
a sporty automobile.)
Another notable thing about this 1943
photograph – the odd linchpin of an otherwise
outwardly conventional selection of photo-
graphs taken by the Surrealist during what
was arguably the nadir of his career, his 11-year
sojourn in Los Angeles after he fled occupied
France – is that he only has half a beard. One
side of his face is clean shaven, and the other
framed by neatly clipped hair. How do you like
me, he seems to ask? With? Without? I will be
whatever you want me to be.
Except the problem was that he wouldn’t.
Even though he adopted different personas
throughout his career, Man Ray never played
the role that Los Angeles had in mind for him
– unlike fellow European émigrés such as Igor
Stravinsky or Fritz Lang. Once he turned up to
a meeting with film producers carrying reproduc-
tions of his paintings instead of his commercial
fashion photography, telling them when asked if
he wanted to be a special-effects man that he was
more interested in being a ‘general effects man’.
Hollywood was unimpressed, or unfamiliar,
with Man Ray’s reputation, and he knew it.
Of the 27 small silver gelatin prints in this
exhibition, most are studio portraits – an unre-
presentative sample from Man Ray’s California
output, given that he claimed to want to focus
on painting rather than commercial photog-
raphy and told his dealer Julien Levy soon after
his arrival, in 1940, that he would no longer
be taking portrait photographs. His resolve
appears to have been shaky; the earliest portrait
in the show, of Isamu Noguchi, is from the
following year.
90
Man Ray’s la
Why would Man Ray have given so much
care and attention to the craft of portrait
photography if he resented it so? Was it purely
as a means to fund his ‘more creative work’
(his words) as it had during his years in Paris?
Self-Portrait with Half Beard, as the 1943 photo
is titled, was selected as the illustration for
a diatribe the artist wrote that same year for
View magazine, titled ‘Photography is Not
Art’, in which he railed at the conservatism
and obsession with technique of photog-
raphy’s proponents. As in his self-portrait,
however, Man Ray was divided. Ironically,
many of the photographs in the exhibition,
such as portraits of actresses Ava Gardner
or Leslie Caron, both from 1950, or his untitled
photographs of Los Angeles street scenes,
do little to advance the medium beyond their
technical proficiency.
Things get interesting, however, when
Man Ray cuts loose in the darkroom. In a
portrait of Tilly Losch, from 1946, the dancer
lifts her gypsy skirt from a dark dripscape of
developing fluid, which reveals the white paper
beneath the exposure. Elsewhere Man Ray
deploys his trademark solarisation technique
(actually an inadvertent darkroom discovery
by his lover Lee Miller, which he appropriated)
to lend a pearlescent aura to a dreamy portrait
of the model and actress Ruth Ford.
Ford, like Losch and other women Man
Ray photographed, was not only a starlet
but a peripheral member of his artistic circle
(her brother was Charles Henri Ford, the
Surrealist writer and editor of View). One gets
– perhaps unsurprisingly – a rather sour taste
of the sexism pervading the creative circles
of the time, with women generally allowed
only the supporting roles of sisters, wives,
lovers or models, and then only on condition
of their beauty. (Even the formidable and
respected Dorothea Tanning, photographed
here in 1948, also happened to be easy on the
eye.) When Man Ray pictures the portly,
ArtReview
slumping figures of Roberto Rossellini,
Henri Langlois and Jean Renoir, by contrast,
no solarisation is required.
The objectification of women is, admit-
tedly, an easy issue to take with glamour
photography of the 1940s and 50s, but in the
photographic work of Man Ray it is especially
obvious. Women look away demurely from
the camera; men gaze squarely into the lens.
(The beautiful and intimate photograph of
Noguchi is a notable exception.) Man Ray had
also, decades earlier, adopted the custom of
posing his female models beside sculptures. In
two photographs here, both from 1944, actresses
Teresa Wright and Tamara Toumanova stand
next to the pre-Columbian carved stone figures
that were then in vogue, offering the viewer
a chance to compare and contrast two modes
of representation, and two forms of beauty.
Man Ray’s misogyny is hard to dodge,
but his preoccupations here may have
extended further than desire alone. In photo-
graphing these actresses (and the occasional
actor), some famous names and others
anonymous, he was reflecting on methods
for constructing identity that he had also
long applied to himself. In 1948 his old friend
Marcel Duchamp visited him in la from
New York, and he contrived an apparently
candid photograph of the pair sitting on a
Parisian doorstep. The sign for the Rue de la
vieille lanterne, however, is a fake; so is Man
Ray’s depiction of himself as French. Born
Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, he was
the son of Russian Jewish immigrants and
an American citizen. There is no doubt that
his inability to assimilate – still less flourish
– in his native country was all the more painful
because of this heritage. His 1948 exhibition
at the Copley Galleries, in Beverly Hills, was
sardonically titled To Be Continued Unnoticed,
and in 1951 he set sail from New York to Paris,
where he remained – better recognised –
for the rest of his life. Jonathan Griffin
Tilly Losch, 1946, vintage gelatin silver print, 34 × 27 cm (unframed). © Man Ray Trust/Artists
Rights Society/adagp, Paris. Courtesy Gagosian Beverly Hills

March 2018 91

Galerie Buchholz, Berlin 10 November – 13 January
Modernist geometric abstraction insisted on
art’s presentness, proscribing memory, illusion,
allusion – anything that pointed beyond the
frame. During the early 2000s, several artists
emerged, among them Martin Boyce, Sergej
Jensen, David Maljkovic and Katja Strunz, who
saw ironic potential in turning this bias on its
head, using formalism to retrospectively allude
to the absolutist claims – of transcendence and
finality – that modernist artists had made for it.
Tomma Abts is among the most distinguished
survivors of that generation, but she has never
been an ironist. She proceeds as if earnest
persistence could overcome the nostalgia to
which her paintings seem condemned, and,
failing that, elegiacally acquiesce to the obso-
lescence of the languages they draw on.
Abts’s paintings are puzzles, literally and
metaphorically: literally because they might
be examples of what W.H. Auden called art
as a ‘contraption’ (he first approached a poem
by asking, ‘How does it work?’). An Abts
painting comes right ‘with a click like a closing
box’ – as another great modernist, W.B. Yeats,
described finishing a poem – resolving mecha-
nism into image. But these are oddly purpose-
less illusions, picturing nothing but their own
structures, their forms hermetically contingent
on each other, committed to perpetual motion
among themselves. Abts’s meticulous layering
of hard-edged planes of colour fetishises her
painstakingness, but the illusionism towards
which it strives is self-concealing: the real time
of painting gives way to the figurative time
of an image’s retrospection, by sinking into
92
Tomma Abts
the shallowest of pictorial spaces. This sleight
of hand is what traditional painting has always
used its imagery for; it only seems paradoxical
here because it is so exclusively self-reflexive.
Repeatedly, Abts bets everything on this spartan
payoff. She is ultimately unlike the modernists
she alludes to, who sought to supplant late-
nineteenth-century aestheticism. For them,
an emphasis on the artwork as a contraption
was a vigorously realist alternative to a mori-
bund formalism that had lost contact with
life. Abts’s art has the pure aestheticism of the
arcanely artisanal, the skill no one else has the
patience to master. This is l’art pour l’art – like
Fabergé eggs, or Flemish still lifes, but without
the bonus of luscious fruit and flowers.
Her paintings are almost always the same
size (an upright 48 × 38 cm), and when they are
not – like the fussily decorative I. (2016) – they
stray into pictorial issues they seem unequipped
to deal with. They are titled by names that sound
like no one’s name, and therefore nothing one
can empathise with, their alienation exacerbated
by the aura-cultivating distance that always sepa-
rates them. The relatively recent inclusion of
shaped canvases, punning between composition
and canvas, might be a sophisticated joke on what
art historian Michael Fried called ‘deductive struc-
ture’ – the making of a painting’s design totally
contingent upon its support – if it didn’t seem
a category error to speak of Abts making jokes.
This exhibition pivots around another
extrapolation from her staple form: Jelto (2017)
is a solemnly tarnished, slightly skewed rec-
tangle of bronze, a painting-as-ingot, casting
Jelto, 2017, bronze cast, 48 × 38 cm.
Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, Cologne & New York
ArtReview
what appears to be one of her paintings (the
bronze registers the canvas’s tooth). Adum-
brating form in the absence of colour contrasts,
a spectrum of tracks, raised in shallow relief,
recedes into the top left corner, diversified by
three circles, like planets suspended in a burst of
cosmic rays. The result is tautological: paintings
designed to invest modernist presentness with
the memory of its history are turned into what
might be their fossils. Jelto’s receding vectors
take the soberly consequential momentum of
Abts’s process and freeze it into a sign for what
it alludes to. They recall the fanning segments
of Mark Grotjahn’s monochrome ‘Butterfly’
paintings, which, as hermetic formalism at
the same time as an image of radiating light
or a butterfly’s wingspan, reformulate well-
lauded tropes from the modernist past, while
acknowledging that their original claim to
formal autonomy is no longer viable.
Abts’s art is both limited and distinguished
by its inability to make such worldly distinctions.
Jelte (2017) is a composite of painting and cast,
divided two-thirds of the way across, as if one
were metamorphosing into the other, present
into past, image into the image of an image,
across the force field between canvas and bronze.
Its kitschy trompe l’oeil effects – pebbledash
speckling, tonal gradation, drop shadows,
the bronze’s representation of canvas – are less
functional illusions than forms of ornament
that embroider the painting’s language, as if
to compensate for lapses of memory. Perhaps
all of Abts’s ingenuity is only needed for lack
of a real object to remember. Mark Prince

Tretyakov Gallery and Schusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow 1 August – 14 September
Vsevolod Meyerhold lies languidly on a bed, his
head propped up on two pillows. The bedspread
wears a floral pattern in yellow and green, as
vivacious as the theatre director’s eyes are dull
and downcast. A dog rests on Meyerhold’s legs;
an open box of sweets and a closed book sit
atop an occasional table. Meyerhold had every
reason to be depressed when Pyotr Konchalovsky
painted him in 1938. He knew which way
the political wind was blowing: in 1939 he was
arrested and tortured. A year later he was dead.
It is while I am staring at this oil painting
hung in the Tretyakov, with a plaque detailing
the influence upon it of Henri Matisse, that I hear
a soprano voice drifting through the museum.
“This is propaganda,” it soars. “You know… you
know…,” it dips. I follow the refrain into the next
gallery. Here the museum’s chronologically hung
works lead visitors through to Socialist Realism
(which Konchalovsky would adopt, the artist
surviving Stalin’s reign). A crowd has gathered,
and their eyes are on a middle-aged lady. Though
not in uniform – none of the institution’s staff
are – by the manner in which she paces the
space, without apparent interest in the art, I take
her for an invigilator. She starts again. “This is
Socialist Realism gallery at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Photo: Evgeny Alekseev. Courtesy v-a-c Foundation, Moscow & Venice
Tino Sehgal
propaganda, you know… you know…” At the
end, this singing guard names the performance:
“Tino Sehgal, This is propaganda, 2002”.
It is a work I have seen before, at Tate Britain
in 2006 (though it was conceived for the 50th
Venice Biennale, three years earlier). Its rendi-
tion here, among the propaganda of Socialist
Realism, blunts the work’s more general point
that all art, regardless of place or time, has overt
political sensibilities. Art is about shaping
minds, and museums (and biennials) are tools
of state narrative. Yet what nuance may be lost
in this presentation, programmed by Moscow’s
v-a-c Foundation, is justified in the awful
pathos that replaces it.
A few rooms along, in front of two vast
paintings, one depicting Stalin and Marshall
Klim Voroshilov in conversation, another of
Stalin in his war room, surrounded by military
officers, a couple are kissing. Their bodies
intertwine on the floor. It’s a romantic affair,
the pair, who appear to be in their late twenties,
elegant in slow movement. A hand climbs up a
thigh, slides down a back. Their eyes never leave
each other. This is love, Kiss (2003) proclaims,
love presented among a history of hate.
March 2018
If the surroundings of the Tretyakov
provides heavy context for this debut Russian
survey of Sehgal’s work, then an empty annex
of the Schusev State Museum of Architecture
is a more neutral venue. Here This Progress
(2006) is staged, a performance in which a relay
of actors, progressively older, engage visitors
in one-to-one conversations before handing
them over abruptly to their colleague. From
this series of intense exchanges the visitor
goes into the pitch-black anonymity of This
Variation (2012), where, shrouded in darkness,
a choir performs a series of nonlinguistic
noises a cappella.
In Meyerhold’s theory of drama, action
leads to emotion (the opposite of method
acting): through stylised poses and gestures
that eschew naturalism, the actor conjures
feeling. Sehgal’s work, in its repetition and
tight, elegant choreography, operates in this
tradition. The staging of his work in such an
emotive context – performing This is Propaganda
in a room of propaganda – is manipulative,
but that suits Sehgal. I don’t resent the pathos
the artist and his curators inflict, fake or
otherwise. Oliver Basciano
93
 Sophie Calle and her guest Serena Carone Beau doublé, Monsieur le marquis!
Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris 10 October – 11 February

Last year, Sophie Calle received a very unusual
request, something relatively usual for her. She
was invited to take over the Musée de la Chasse
et de la Nature, an exquisitely bizarre private
museum dedicated to hunting, containing
eclectic collections of historical and contempo-
rary artworks, trophies, guns and other curios.
She brought along some of her entourage:
a dozen mounted animals from her own collec-
tion, and her sculptor friend Serena Carone.
Rest assured that the latter isn’t stuffed,
although she has an immobile equivalent in
Calle’s menagerie: the French conceptualist,
whose narrative practice revolves around kooky
relationships and chance encounters, owns
over a hundred preserved creatures, named
after friends and family.
Calle (and Carone)’s exhibition, whose title
translates as Nice doubled shot, sir!, begins on the
museum’s first floor, where the wall text Mes
morts (My dead ones, 2017) discloses further
information about her special ‘pets’. In her will,
the artist has bequeathed her friends their
respective beasts, but for those whose dedicatees
don’t survive her, she’s thinking of taking their
animals to the grave. The showstopper Deuil
pour deuil (A death for a death, 2017) gives a splendid
idea of what her dream mausoleum may look
like. A lifesize recumbent statue, made in glazed
ceramic by Carone, represents Calle in fancy
flowered dress and mourning veil, surrounded
by animals including a giraffe for her mother,
Monique, a tiger for her father, Bob, and a baby
zebra for her cat, Souris. Most of the artworks
on this floor are concerned with Calle’s current
grief over these last two. In Le fantôme de Souris
(Souris’s ghost, 2017), a framed text overhanging
a photograph of the cat on her bed, she puts her
sorrow into perspective by observing that at least
she doesn’t fall asleep with her father’s ghost
between her pillows every night.
The exhibition continues upstairs in a maze
of heavily decorated rooms and alcoves. Thirty-
eight undated, autobiographical anecdotes
from Calle’s ongoing series Histoires Vraies (True
Stories, 1998–) are artfully camouflaged – for
viewers to hunt – in kitschy frames representing
bear cubs, deer, stags, partridges, etc. Personal
belongings (eg lingerie, more carcasses) are
spread around to illustrate these memories,
whereas Carone’s weird, mixed-media animal
sculptures simply fit too well within the
museum’s collections. In one work from True
Stories, ‘Les chats’ (The cats), Calle recalls three
cats preceding Souris. One met a tragic end:
an ex-boyfriend asked her to choose between
sleeping with him or her pet. She chose the cat,
he strangled it – nearby, a poor stuffed kitty
hangs from a scarf attached to a floral uphol-
stered armchair. Murder aside, the most
perplexing thing is that in another extract,
‘Chambre avec vue’ (Room with a view), Calle
remembers having had no problem sharing
her makeshift bed during a night-long perfor-
mance in the Eiffel Tower with strangers who,
in turns of five minutes, kept her awake and
entertained until dawn (with stories, of course).
In ‘Voyage en Californie’ (Trip to California),
she even sent her mattress, pillows and sheets to
some unknown heartbroken creep overseas who
requested to sleep in her bed for the time needed
to recover. He gratefully sent everything back
six months later: plenty more fish in the sea.
A practical hunt for love actually concludes
the show on the museum’s third floor. For
Le Chasseur français (The French hunter, 2017),
12 framed texts, Calle compiled, and highlighted
key phrases from, personal ads published
in the eponymous French hunting magazine
between 1895 and 2010, summarising the
changing qualities sought in women by men.
Whereas at the turn of the twentieth century
these debonair gentlemen preferred ‘not poor’
and ‘unsullied’, the dream since the turn of
the twenty-first has been different: ‘not a pain
in the ass’, for one thing, ‘not far’ for another.
Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Beau doublé, Monsieur le marquis!, 2017 (installation view). © the artist / adagp.
Photo: Béatrice Hatala. Courtesy Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris

94 ArtReview

Carl Kostyál, Stockholm 7 December 2017 – 14 January
How It’s Made is the first and, as it turns out, the
last exhibition at Carl Kostyál’s new venue in
Nacka, a municipality east of Stockholm. Having
climbed two flights of exterior spiral staircase
on my visit on a dark January afternoon, I am
told that the gallery – situated in the former
headquarters of the fashion company Gant,
its 1990s open-plan office space mostly left
untouched – will move again, since the area
is undergoing real-estate development.
In the exhibition, which was externally
curated by Matt Williams, the central piece
is arguably Ed Atkins’s almost-24-hour-long
video How It’s Made (2016), lending the show
its title. For this work, the artist, known for
his high-definition hyperreal animated videos,
has assembled silenced footage from the
ongoing Discovery Channel programme of
the same name. The show broadcasts manufac-
turing processes of everyday products, from
paper to mascara. In Atkins’s collage of videos,
ripped from YouTube, which he collected while
waiting for hd files to render, the outcome is
omitted: we never get to see the commodified,
satisfyingly final product.
Most works in the exhibition speak about
their own production. Some look more final
than others, for instance Anne Imhof collabo-
rator Eliza Douglas’s To cancel out humanity
(2016), a painting of three hands handing
How It’s Made
out invisible visiting cards. The photorealist
hands were outsourced to an anonymous
Chinese artist, and subsequently connected
by Douglas with broad pink brushstrokes.
In contrast, Piotr Łakomy’s Twin (2017) appears
more crude. It consists of two almost identical
wall-hung collages, each comprising a beat-
up-looking wooden door covered in crumpled
metal honeycomb sheets and a pair of attached
golf balls suggesting eyes. Other works literally
change over time, such as Nina Canell’s Gum
Shelf (2017) in the shape of a minimalist rectan-
gular volume made from pistachio tree rubber,
which slowly gives in to the force of gravity.
Yuri Pattison’s peace mode (default) (2017) offers
a floor-mounted server and adjacent monitor,
upon which crowd-simulation software orches-
trates small humanoids moving across a
greyish-blue globe floating in a black universe.
Jean-Marie Appriou’s Trouble (2017), a sculpture
in the shape of a dromedary standing atop
a reversed second camel that looks like its own
drained mirage, is there to remind us of the real
and its constructed mirrored double, or perhaps
vacant simulacra in hyperreality.
Most works date to the past two years.
One of the few exceptions, albeit from an artist
whose career has revived lately (with institu-
tional shows in Germany, London and Paris),
is Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Lynn Turning Into
Jean-Marie Appriou, Trouble, 2017, aluminium,
300 × 170 × 60 cm. Courtesy Carl Kostyál, Stockholm
March 2018
Roberta (1978), a digitised 16mm film docu-
menting the artist’s transformation into
her alter ego. This work is a timely reminder
that long before selfies, artists were already
occupied with identity politics and construc-
tions of self. In the same space, Yngve Holen’s
Bagatelle (2017), a section of a ct scanner,
conjures morbid attempts at self-perfection
as we turn into commodities ourselves.
How It’s Made, then, combines physical
manufacturing processes with hints at identity
politics and a Postinternet attitude. Most
works on view are products fresh from the
artists’ studios, and the opportunity to offer
a more self-critical or even pathological view
on processes of commodification is missed.
We hardly learn how things – or artworks – 
are made, nor does the exhibition often take
up the banal yet riveting profanity of con-
sumer products and their manufacture, which
are pointed to in Atkins’s video. Perhaps the
clearest instance of these concerns is Violet
Dennison’s Sick Building Syndrome (2017),
a dissected Elkay EZS8L water dispenser
wall-mounted on copper foil, dysfunctional
with its guts out while displaying its inner
workings. Another, corollary case is the gallery’s
imminent move due to further gentrification
in the area, exemplifying, today, how a city
is made. Stefanie Hessler
95

v-a-c Foundation, Venice 26 November – 31 March
Last summer, the story of a failed Facebook
experiment went viral: Alice and Bob, two
semi-intelligent chatbots instructed to trade
objects with each other in order to develop
a new negotiation software, were shut down
after starting a conversation in a self-generated
language (‘balls have zero to me to me to me to
me to me to me to me to me to’). The program-
mers had not instructed the machines to adopt
human-only expressions, and the ensuing
(temporary) human inability to interpret what
was going on on the ‘other side’ was translated
by the media into paramount anxiety.
I was reminded of this after entering the
new v-a-c Foundation in Venice, funded
by Russian energy tycoon Leonid Mikhelson.
Shannon Ebner’s video Dear Reader, installed
across the entrance, records the flashes of a
portable changeable-message sign, programmed
by the artist to display her poem ‘The Electric
Comma’ (both 2011) – the work lending this
group show its title. An elliptical line like
‘the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet
is a blank comma delay a language of exposures’
is almost illegible, because of the changing
text’s fast pace. In the age of voice commands
and ai policing of online content, the question
of how language is articulated, and what it
suppresses or silences, resonates with new
meanings. In ‘hacking’ a sign machine
Shannon Ebner, Dear Reader (still), 2011, single-channel video, 3 min.
96
The Electric Comma
originally designed to safeguard humans
by delivering intelligible instructions, Ebner
makes room for blanks, glitches, strikes and
asterisks, indicating that ‘there is more informa-
tion elsewhere’ (as she explains in a conversation
with Zoe Leonard in bomb magazine).
Jointly presenting 27 works from the
collections of the v-a-c and Kadist foundations
(the show’s cocurators), the exhibition focuses
on how contemporary art mirrors human
encounters with the machinic sublime.
Some works are literally based on encounters:
in the striking (if much-shown) 16mm film
Soft Materials (2004) by Daria Martin, shot in
the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University
of Zürich, two naked dancers meet with
deep-learning robots. A flesh limb rubs against
a metal one, steel fingers run along a smooth
arm, resulting in moments of contact, intimacy
and erotic tension, where touch is key; our
notion of the digital is, after all, rooted in the
digitus (finger). In Pedro Neves Marques’s video
The Pudic Relation Between Machine and Plant
(2016), a Mimosa pudica, a plant that protects
itself by briefly folding its leaves when touched,
is caressed by a robotic hand that behaves as
if equally pudicus (shy). By contrast, The Brute
Force – 1997 (2017) by Fabien Giraud and Raphaël
Siboni, the second episode of the duo’s ongoing
The Unmanned video series, follows the rigid
Courtesy Sadie Coles hq , London
ArtReview
movements of a computer-programmed camera
across an empty set, one that reproduces the
room where, in May 1997, the ibm Deep Blue
computer defeated chess legend Garry Kasparov.
Cheyney Thompson’s gridded Stochastic
Process Painting 11 (2014) mimics the structure of
the Drunken Walk algorithm, used by investors
to predict stock prices, while with Untitled #1,
#2 and #3 (all 2007) Piero Golia stages an ironic
ballet mécanique where the passage of time is
embodied by a water puddle forming on the
ground, a constantly revolving broom and
a machine that fires clay pigeons against the
wall once an hour, suddenly bringing noise,
fear and destruction into the space, and
possibly hinting at a future when the hunting
abilities of robocops may be of global concern.
Misting Miner (2016), a vapour sculpture by
Alexey Buldakov from the Russian collective
Urban Fauna Lab, turns the energy-consuming
extraction, or mining, of fluid cryptocurrencies
like Ethereum into a more familiar process
generating heat, evaporation and condensa-
tion. Outside the window, the Giudecca island
on the other side of the canal looks on the verge
of flooding: in the age of algorithmic capi-
talism and its impact on climate change, Venice
is sinking faster then ever. The line between
the metaphorical and the real appears suddenly
thin. Barbara Casavecchia

Sies & Höke, Düsseldorf 17 November – 13 January
There is a lucid, analytically trenchant text by
Ajay Kurian, ‘The Ballet of White Victimhood’,
about Jordan Wolfson’s Colored sculpture (2016),
written with the anger of desperation. Kurian,
an American of Indian origin, wrote it a few days
after Trump was elected, looking for explana-
tions in his colleague’s work for the victory
of the self-proclaimed silent majority, ‘a breed
of white males who believe they are persecuted
while being the aggressor, and are powerful
while maintaining a sense of painful fragility’.
It is precisely this cognitive dissonance that
Kurian continues to explore in his undoubtedly
ambitious Düsseldorf exhibition American Artist.
On the upper floor of the completely dark-
ened gallery, a deep flokati rug in muted cream
colour is laid out, conjuring the atmosphere
of a filthy motel. Old pizza boxes are scattered
about (Locavores Eat Globally, all works 2017),
next to an overturned fridge full of broken salsa
bottles, exuding an acrid stench (Master Slave
Complex [Proleptically Speaking], ii). The sauces
are labelled with slogans such as ‘Trump that
Bitch’ and ‘Redneck Sauce’, suggesting the
following interpretation: this is the parallel
world of one of those hate-filled white men
who believe in the ‘Pizzagate conspiracy’ and
detest immigrants, but still eat Mexican sauces,
because eating soy sauce makes you gay; due
to the oestrogen, of course! Yet the brand of the
fridge – Privilege – indicates that this supposed
Photo: Achim Kukulies. Courtesy 47 Canal, New York, and Sies & Höke, Düsseldorf
Ajay Kurian American Artist
war of cultures boils down to the fear of losing
one’s privileges. Even though the works are
quickly decoded, the immersive environment
very convincingly breeds unease. Kurian’s case
for necessary intervention is also persuasive,
although one may be tempted to ask if he
himself is not using the same divisive us/them
rhetoric in reverse.
The installation Satters and Pullman, previ-
ously shown at the last Whitney Biennial,
is significantly more complex. Accompanied
by Bobby Darin crooning Mack the Knife (1959),
two figures hang from a rope, the upper kicking
the lower in the face. The figures’ faces are made
of sunglasses-wearing crescent moons, inspired
by an old McDonald’s advertising character
called Mac Tonight, which, like Pepe the Frog,
is very popular in alt-right memes on 4Chan
and 8Chan. Again one is confronted with the
coarse social Darwinism of the American right,
which here also turns inward, since one Mac
Tonight is beating up another. Via the music,
Kurian interlaces the whole thing with the
chequered history of the ‘murder ballad’ Mack
the Knife from Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 Threepenny
Opera (incidentally also the song in the ad fea-
turing Mac Tonight), which over the years
has turned the criminal into a hero.
Since the financial crash of 2008, the call
for partisanship and political intervention has
grown louder, especially in the artworld. Kurian
Satters and Pullman, 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable.
March 2018
has taken up this call after previously making
eclectic material composites that suggested
he was turning into a contemporary revenant
of Jason Rhoades. This is to be welcomed; the
only question is whether his rhetoric is some-
times not too explicit, a rebuke frequently and
rightfully levelled at political art in particular.
I’m thinking of the completely black room in
which a white vulture (Untitled, 2017) glances
observingly at a light sculpture (Locked, 2017)
recessed into the wall, which turns out to be a
dying sun. Dimly lit, positioned on a red-veined
travertine pedestal and fabricated using pricey
Carrara marble, the vulture strongly recalls an
eagle and thus the heraldic animal of the us pres-
ident. Not very subtle, though the staging of this
end-times scenario is once again stunning.
How Kurian uses darkness, colourful light
sources and dim lighting in this show to trigger
bodily unease and defensive reflexes is particu-
larly impressive. Intended or not, the relation-
ship with the works is thus dominated by senti-
ment, precluding any rational access, which in
turn suggests the absurd way Trump supporters
deal with facts. In any case, Kurian’s ‘Murder
Ballad for America in Sculptural Form’, as the
press release has it, caters to an illusionism
based on empathy, which Brecht had already
rejected for any politically progressive art – yet
his most famous counterexample, of all things,
is The Threepenny Opera. Moritz Scheper
97
 Evelyn Taocheng Wang Four Season of Women Tragedy
Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam 24 November – 20 January
A dark dress floats above a rock-strewn riverbed
in Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s drawing Virginia
Woolf on Riverside (all works 2017). The scene
alludes to the eponymous writer’s drowning,
achieved by wading into a river wearing clothes
she had weighed down with stones. Ducks calmly
swim past, oblivious to the tragedy. Life goes on.
A matching dress lies on the floor in front of the
drawing, as though it had just washed up there.
The garment comes from the wardrobe of the
artist, who is Chinese, transgender and lives in
the Netherlands. It’s the dress she likes to wear
to openings, she mentioned to me: it makes her
feel feminine, European, glamorous.
Many of the works on display here combine
drawings, sculptures and paintings on canvas
with fashion items. The dresses, blouses, bags
and shoes, all from the brand Agnès B. (Wang
bought them with the the Volkskrant Art Prize
money she won in 2016), are indicators of a
fascination with the construction of femininity.
To Wang, the garments from the Paris fashion
house stand for feminine elegance, sophistica-
tion and the freedom to be the person you want
to be. Whether or not that’s objectively the case,
Four Season of Women Tragedy, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij.
98
what becomes clear in this exhibition is that
femininity doesn’t always come naturally, nor
are its surfaces and effects straightforward.
Take Save my baby first, a drawing that recalls
a Chinese fable about a snake that changes into
a woman through trickery and deceit. The scene
depicts a young woman in danger of being
deluged by urine, while she desperately holds
her baby above her head. ‘Save my baby first’,
she calls out to the holy monk on the horizon
(the text is written on the drawing). But he’s
not easily fooled. ‘She’s a real woman now?
She just gave birth? No, no, this is impossible.
She is not a woman! She is a false one!’ This
surreal drama proves fatal. Beneath the drawing
lies the red dress of the trickster.
Four Season of Women Tragedy, the title of the
show, is in Chinglish, a mix of Chinese and
English, pointing up another commingled sense
of self. The gallery walls are painted pink, as in
a fashion boutique. Occupying the middle of the
space are four wooden sculptures with garments
that represent the seasons. Winter, a Jugendstil-
like fitting room, complete with wooden icicles
on the edge of the roof, contains a winter coat
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam
ArtReview
and woollen cap. The choice of what to wear
naturally follows the cycle of the seasons.
However, the appraising eye cast through
the cloakroom is necessarily guided by imagina-
tion: does this suit me? What do I look like in
it? Wang fantasises about what type of woman
she wants to be, and we watch with her: a series
of 50 colour photographs on the wall show
the artist in 50 different creations in as many
locations (Photosynthesis). This ode to ladylike
beauty, intended as a foil for trashy drabness,
is something of a cross between a Cindy
Sherman series and a fashion shoot.
According to the accompanying text, Wang
sympathises with Lily Briscoem from Woolf’s
novel To the Lighthouse, a restless painter trying
to find herself, aggrieved because ‘women cannot
write, women cannot paint’. Wang’s combination
of fashion items and drawings here may not
have produced a consistently cohesive result,
but the exhibition as a whole is both uplifting
and engaging: with spirit and wit, it stages
feminine identity as a complex, highly personal
melodrama. Dominic van den Boogerd
Translated from the Dutch by Billy Nolan
 Otobong Nkanga The Breath From Fertile Grounds
Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin 8 December – 10 February
In his soap opera-like 1995 drama Buddleia,
the Dublin playwright Paul Mercier settled
on the plant then pushing its magenta blossoms
through the brickwork of so much of half-
derelict Georgian Dublin, using it as a delicately
unstable and possibly romantic image of
an unquenchable process finding its substrate
in the spasms of economic upheaval. Otobong
Nkanga, arriving in the city more than two
decades later, quickly lighted upon similar
metaphors, reading a resistance that grows
parasitical on collapse, even if now – plant
life being as susceptible as any other to rising
urban price per square metre – sustained
in an increasingly paved-over world by ever
smaller lifeforms: moss, lichens and other
myco-squatters.
Following her appearance in Koyo Kouoh’s
2016 eva International (Ireland’s biennial of
contemporary art), the Nigerian-born, Antwerp-
based Nkanga has been exploring the Irish
capital – its building sites with their rebar
skeletons, its museums with their hordes of
repoussé metals – all the while running sorties
to the distant boglands so beloved of Seamus
Heaney, themselves great and squelching
deep-time archives of laid-down metaphors.
The Breath From Fertile Grounds is explicitly the
result of those various travels. The installation
incorporates husky chunks of bricks (possibly
Photo: Kasia Kaminska. Courtesy Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin
even the same ones that featured in Mercier’s
stage set), along with a painted element that
blooms like mould across the gallery wall;
poetry in both the Irish and English languages
printed on sheets of cloth and draped over iron
rods; and, of course, those mossy, grey-green,
teal and silver flora that love to expand from
pocks, cracks, chips and transitional sites when
the immediate trauma of demolition and
rebuilding abates long enough.
In Handshake (all works 2017) the artist has
installed two columns built from reclaimed
bricks – “locally sourced”, assures the gallery
staffer, woke to locavore values – between which
a slender metal baton holds in place a saddle,
supporting another plaster-splattered piece
of rubble, capped gently with a fine haze of
green shoots of tenacious life. Or have they died?
Even resistance has a best-before date. Nkanga’s
transporting of bricks into the gallery evokes
a cull of brick buildings in Dublin, while also
activating the material’s biography, the deep
history each clay brick retains and, consequently,
what a fine substrate they make for thready
lichens, friable mosses and other emblematic
growths of a damp island. While not novel,
her recognition of this merges productively
into a rhizome of contemporary practice that
thinks through the networks outside the
animal kingdom, practice that stretches from
The Breath From Fertile Grounds, 2017 (installation view).
March 2018
Camille Henrot back to Marcel Broodthaers,
to the sculptural biosystems of Méadhbh
O’Connor and, most notably here, Camilla
Berner’s Black Box Garden (2011), another work
that piggybacks on the ‘wild’ flowers of
demolition sites.
Such sprouts are everywhere, promising
to break apart – albeit geologically slowly –
once solid bricks; or equally possibly, to hold
them together against the assault of time.
All the same, the combined forces of plants
and fungi work their way into the bricks as
surely as death, as in 2017 ad (the letters, Nkanga
said in an artist’s talk, for her refer to Antwerp
and Dublin), a found totem, a clump of bricks
and mortar from which a curved iron proboscis
emerges, like an urbanised, abstracted elephant
god on whose head sits, once again, a small
colonial presence of spidery sprouts. For
Nkanga, the way all this autonomous activity
teems into the most visible scars of destruction,
the most egregious insults to the space of the
public, to civic life, offers an image of something
that resists, though notably something non-
and extra-human. If the earth, despite all its
bad habits, abideth forever, perhaps it will be
these ostensibly tender, functionally resilient
shoots, rather than those most uncharismatic
of noncharismatic microfauna, the cockroaches,
who will endure. Luke Clancy
99

Galerie Emanuel Layr, Rome 26 November – 17 February
Gaylen Gerber’s first solo show in Emanuel
Layr’s Rome gallery offers cause for reflection
on the diversity of objects that populate our
collective global history. Indebted both to the
readymade and the monochrome, the exhibition
features 21 found objects from diverse origins,
all of them uniformly painted by the American
artist in one of two colours: an institutional
grey and an off-white.
These objects, all named Support (no date)
and positioned on seven untreated mdf plinths,
appear both homogenised and, at the same
time, more clearly differentiated by their
uniform colouring. This contradiction is met
with another, as the works are somehow freed
from their history in undergoing a process of
standardisation, without effacing their origins.
The positioning of, for example, an earthenware
statuette of the Tang Dynasty (618–800 ce) next
to an earthenware bowl made by the Anasazi
(Ancient Pueblo peoples) – who populated the
Southwestern United States from 800 to 1200 ce
– appears to elevate both of them. Through a
myriad of juxtapositions between objects placed
on the same plinth and across different plinths,
the uniqueness of each item is somehow
emphasised. From aluminium drinks cans
to protective statuettes and icons made to ward
off bad spirits, to a Hindu musical trumpet
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna & Rome
100
Gaylen Gerber
of the late-nineteenth-to-early-twentieth
century, something of the diversity of human
activity is convened under one roof.
Naturally the tendency is to look for, or
invent, narratives spun from the correlation
between objects. According to the laws
of Gestalt psychology, we are bound to do
so whether we intend to or not. In this light
the first plinth seems particularly rife with
associations, hosting as it does an off-white
aluminium drinks can in a paper bag (a rare
differently coloured element), a cinematic
prop of a severed ear from the Hughes
Brothers’ film Dead Presidents (1995) and a
concrete fragment of 3400 Wilshire Boulevard,
Los Angeles: the location of the hotel where
Robert Kennedy was shot in 1968. Whether
one is aware of the provenance of the objects
or not, the suggestion of alcoholism is evoked
by the can sitting in its paper sack – it is
common in the us for vagrants to carry their
drinks concealed due to prohibitions on public
drinking. The severed ear suggests violence;
the concrete block on its metal support might
further support this assumption. We have all
the inspirations necessary to write a short and
very troubled story. Yet in a twist the viewer
might find both endearing and infuriating,
Gerber himself apparently claims no intention
Gaylen Gerber, 2017 (installation view).
ArtReview
behind the positioning of given objects within
a constellation, which are intended to be seen
as independent of each other. Once known, this
fact presents a kind of task for the audience:
to see each object as complete in itself.
The result is a kind of antiarchive, as mate-
rials are freed by their institutional categorisa-
tion (in this case as ‘artworks’ in a contemporary
art gallery) rather than captured by it. This
arises as the sameness imposed on the objects,
and the injunction to see them one by one,
focuses the viewer on their individual prop-
erties in the present, rather than on a conjured
historical association. In this light the off-
white-painted Cambodian lintel fragment
depicting Kala of Angkor, a Hindu and Buddhist
deity – placed on the plinth situated farthest
from the gallery’s entrance – can be appreciated
for its formal properties as much as for its
religious associations. Gerber rids objects
of the folkic peculiarities that tend to cloud our
perceptions of them by making them conform
to a uniform and institutional aesthetic, leaving
us free to investigate their cultural associations
if we wish. In our current political climate,
where cultural appropriation can easily offend,
he deftly balances the subjugation and enhance-
ment of his objects’ cultural backgrounds.
Mike Watson
 Yan Pei-Ming A Short History of Power and Death
Massimo De Carlo, London 4 October – 16 December

If recounting A Short History of Power and Death,
the title of Yan Pei-Ming’s second show in
London, where would you begin? The first
room of the show is hung with five paintings
from the series Napoleon Crowning Himself
Emperor (all works 2017). Based on a figure
study by Jacques-Louis David, from whom the
Corsican commissioned a gargantuan record
of his 1804 self-coronation, the pose depicted
didn’t in fact make it into the final commission
(Napoleon demanding a less imperious gesture
instead). Ten years later, he was deposed, as
evoked by the vertiginous composition of one
work in the series (Napoleon Crowning Himself
– Purple), the emperor’s face squeezed low in a
rectangular canvas. The fate of another emperor
is recorded in The Execution of Maximilian, after
Manet, which follows one of Édouard Manet’s
five versions of the subject – one of which was at
some stage cut into pieces, only being reassem-
bled (by Edgar Degas) after the artist’s death.
Across the room from this are monochrome
portraits of four national leaders whose grip on
power remains all-too-stable: Donald Trump,
Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin and Kim
Jong-un (Presidents D.T., B.A-A., V.P., K.J-U.). Ming
began his career by creating portraits of Mao
Zedong, and so while these tyrannical authority
figures are not unexpected subjects for him, what
does surprise is how much sensory excitement
he pumps from the planes and crevasses of their
cold visages, the tense rhythm of light and dark
that sweeps across the sequence.
Ming may in this selection of subjects
be gesturing to art’s continuing implication
in the morally compromised circumstances
of its production and circulation (aristocratic
patronage may be less central to the contempo-
rary art market than in First Empire France,
but, as the likes of Hito Steyerl remind us, it
is hardly independent of the ruling interests
of the global economic order). Yet I think a
different emphasis is present here. Wrenching
visual pleasure from such austere, off-putting
subjects as Assad et al feels almost like a kind
of revenge: an affirmation of art’s perverse
detachment from its subject matter, its ability
to make the ghastly beautiful (or the beautiful
ghastly). Napoleon is deposed, Maximilian
shot – but Degas rescues Manet’s dismembered
canvas, David’s sketch is recovered. When Putin
and his ilk are gone, too, these pictures will
still exist, and still be attractive. Very subtly,
a counternarrative to the titular history of power
and death emerges: one of conscious salvage but
also art’s indifferent endurance and survival.
Upstairs, a vanitas-style still life of two
skulls (Crown, Skulls and Flowers) – one bedecked
with a crown just like the one Napoleon clutches
– leads onto three paintings based on a photo-
graph of the car crash that took Jackson
Pollock’s life in 1956. The conjunction of the
skulls and the car’s metal carcass could be read
as a broad comment about the transience of
earthly glory, whether that of a monarch or a
feted talent. But the choice of subject feels more
particular than that – and not just as an homage
to Andy Warhol in the era of his Death and
Disaster series (1962–63). In the years preceding
his death, Pollock barely made work, painting
seeming to fail him, or he to fail painting.
Yet even in his artless demise, Ming shows,
an image persisted: one which in this painter’s
hands, 60 years later, becomes expressive, poetic
and, in passages, quite mesmerisingly beautiful.
Throughout the show, Ming’s gestural brush-
work recalls entrails, smeared and slapped
across the canvas, like the trail of a vulture
writhing about in carrion. Just as a rotting body
inevitably leaves guts and bones, Ming seems
to say, in our image world, every life, every
story leaves remains – remains with which,
for good or ill, artists can do what they
please. Matthew McLean

Presidents d.t., b.a-a., v.p., k.j-u., 2017, oil on canvas, 80 × 349 cm (overall).
Photo: Todd-White. Courtesy Massimo De Carlo, Milan, London & Hong Kong

March 2018 101

 Larry Achiampong Sunday’s Best
Copperfield, London 23 November – 16 December
Sunday’s Best (2016) is a contemplative short film
that explores faith and history as a personal
and collective experience. Presented as a
largescale single-screen projection, it begins
with the pulsating soundtrack of an African
church service accompanied by a minute-long
visual cacophony of historical and contemporary
imagery drawn from archival, history-book
and television sources. Fleeting and mesmer-
ising, these images are barely decipherable,
but last long enough to give the impression
of seismic and even catastrophic events that
have befallen and continue to shape the black
diaspora: the Atlantic slave trade, the scramble
for Africa, colonial rule, forced migration,
xenophobia, the aftermath of police brutality.
As sound and visuals fade, a vivid closeup
of a young boy fills the screen, head bowed
and eyes closed in deep contemplation. Organ
music, reminiscent of the beginning of a
religious service, here introduces our narrator.
He recalls learning about religious figures
and deities, and wearing his Sunday best for
church. He also recounts the three types of
imagery that could be found in his childhood
home: historic Ghanaian freedom fighters,
family members and images of Jesus, “the only
white person important enough to share a place
Sunday’s Best (still), 2016, 4k video, colour, sound, 15 min 47 sec.
102
on my family’s walls”. He continues, “I always
wondered why someone from Bethlehem was
as white as chalk.” This candour is purposeful,
contrasting with the subtle interplay of image
and sound, space and scale.
The majority of the film centres on static
shots of the inside of archetypal Christian
churches, replete with details of white religious
icons, stained-glass windows, altars, stations
of the cross and church organs. Such sacred
imagery is punctuated by the sound of African
worship and is at odds with the narrator’s
recollections of his family’s church in London,
which was more akin to those places of worship
located in less conventional environments
such as vacated shops and pubs or decommis-
sioned municipal buildings.
The title of the work is itself a play on
words. Its meaning is ambiguous: alluding
to sartorial custom, it could also be someone’s
name, or an assertion that Sunday is the
pinnacle of the week. During the denouement,
in the previously empty church we come face-
to-face with a woman who emerges ghostlike
in front of the altar. She is dressed in a striking
traditional West African outfit. A closeup
lingers on a detail of fabric, a signifier of her
African identity; equally it could be a play
Courtesy the artist and Copperfield, London
ArtReview
on the sanctity of ‘the cloth’. Animated in
her gestures, the woman closes her eyes; tears
trickle down her cheeks. She looks to be in
a state of spiritual euphoria, or a mournful
but dignified incongruous presence within
a congregation-less church; here the discord
between sound and image disrupts the narra-
tive flow. The single authorial voice is itself
subsumed by an almost otherworldly inter-
vention. Presented in a former church and
projected at a scale that covers the entire width
of one end of the space, the result is a physically
immersive and emotive experience, as the
gallery becomes an extension of the church
depicted in the film.
African-led churches are today a promi-
nent feature of a number of Britain’s cities.
Their presence signifies a multifaith and
multicultural society. While an integral part
of the landscape, they also occupy a decidedly
separate sphere to that of Britain’s more
conventional Christian churches. Achiampong
brings into dialogue these separate but
historically intertwined manifestations
of Christianity. In doing so, he constructs
a compelling study about an often-overlooked
aspect of faith and history in contemporary
Britain. Richard Hylton

Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow 8 December – 18 March
Elusive narratives and bold aesthetics run
through the works in British artist Aaron
Angell’s latest exhibition. Villa wasp mattress
demonstration (all works 2017) is a transparent
inflatable mattress with crude pig’s-blood
cement tiles laid out inside to resemble a
hypocaust (the underfloor heating system
Romans used). Sewer gas lamp demonstration
sees the pig’s-blood cement take a cloddish,
fencelike form. A gas canister feeds through
to lamps at the front of this structure that
are couched behind an enlarged ancient coin,
cast in amber-coloured glass. Scalar cabbage
demonstration is a giant cabbage growing
within an oversize pig’s-blood cement pot.
All of these works suggest antiquarian technolo-
gies, pig’s-blood cement itself an ancient
formula with a remarkable capacity to endure
for millennia. They also speak of bodily
necessities – sleep, waste, food – admixing
with matter. Their lumpen naivety belies
a deep, holistic wisdom.
In stark visual contrast, A Large Wardian
Case (an early type of terrarium, c. 1860)
Sewer gas lamp demonstration (detail), 2017, pig’s-blood cement, cast glass, gas fittings. Photo: Max Slaven.
Aaron Angell
at the opening of the exhibition introduces
an aesthetic Angell’s work inevitably spurns;
a Victorian elegance rooted in symmetry,
graceful lines and delicate ornament.
Only the moss and ferns contained within
it are comparatively organic. And herein
lies Angell’s wonderful inversion, because
once attuned to his outlandish sculptures,
the erstwhile bullish case seems oddly
lacking. For all its enlightened sophistica-
tion it can’t match the embodied knowledge
that Angell’s bulbous yet magnanimous
monuments evoke.
Add to this spiral of ideas a series of
contemporary ceramic takes on cineraria
(Roman containers for ash or bone) and
a reverse-painted glass depicting a Vision
of the purgatorial ladder with frogs and toads
(the exhibition text tells us this is derived
from an eleventh-century image of such
a ladder) and you’re in the midst of an
intriguing assemblage. Angell’s cineraria,
with their gritty, imprecise bodies and
pooled glazes, seems to consign their
Courtesy the artist and Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
March 2018
supposed contents to an afterlife devoid
of conventional beauty or taste. And in this
light, purgatory – where you await purifi-
cation before moving on – speaks to the
astute aesthetic dialogue Angell has honed
within the field of ceramics, negotiating
the fractious expectations of art and craft.
Of course, one challenge of goma is its
scale and imposing neoclassical architecture.
Angell aims to counter this by appropriating,
as he is quoted as saying, the ‘cliché of the
loft, the archipelago of stations, objects,
and pools of light’, but I think this strategy
meets with mixed success. Priming viewers
by isolating the Wardian Case, an affective
miniature of the room, works well. Elsewhere
however the freestanding plastered walls,
with their slightly wonky arches and combed
surfaces, break the seductive dialogues of the
works, not declamatory enough to shake
an unnecessary white-cube overtone. But
let this not detract from a remarkably
enticing exhibition driven by a seductive,
protean energy. James Clegg
103

Tate Britain, London 12 September – 21 January
There’s something quite compelling in obsessive
repetition, the way, say, French composer Erik
Satie insisted on repeating musical motifs over
and over, or 840 times in the case of Vexations
(1893–94), as if on a mystical quest. Though here
Satie was striving to test the virtues of ‘boredom’
in music, Rachel Whiteread, whose whole oeuvre
consists of variations on a single approach, seems
on a quest to capture the essence of memory.
Her repetitive process is made bluntly apparent
in this retrospective, which, housed in one large
room, offers a panoramic view of her oeuvre.
Throughout her 30-year career, the British artist
has been casting – in concrete and plaster for
the most part, as well as using a range of other
materials including resins, glass, rubber and
wax – the ‘negative spaces’ around domestic
objects and structures (from toilet paper rolls
to bathtubs to entire houses), revealing their
imperfect surfaces and undersides, paradoxically
preserving their presence by making their
absence tangible. As these empty spaces materi-
alise, they become lasting tributes not only
to objects and places, but also to memory itself
– giving shape to its abstract and fleeting nature.
104
Rachel Whiteread
The two aisles formed by the plaster-cast
rows of cabinets in Untitled (Book Corridors)
1997–98) evoke library shelves stacked with
books, but take a closer look and you’ll realise
these are not casts of bookshelves, but rather
of the spaces between them, revealing the
books’ pages rather than their spines. The
same goes for the haptic Torso series (1991–99),
which renders the emptiness inside a hot-
water bottle in plaster, rubber, resin, wax
and concrete. Some of the resulting objects
actually look their part (the cast of a card-
board box’s interior ultimately looks like
its original), but the most intriguing ones
differ enough from their model to keep
things interesting. The experience of look-
ing at Untitled (Stairs) (2001), for instance,
a freestanding concrete sculpture of two
flights of stairs facing each other, is some-
thing comparable to trying to figure out
whether the edges of a cube drawn on paper
are projecting out from or receding into the
page: you’re never quite able to project what
the ‘positive’ version of the stairs would look
like. But perhaps that’s exactly the point:
Untitled (Book Corridors), 1997–98, plaster and steel,
222 × 427 × 523 cm. © Tate. Courtesy the artist
ArtReview
the sculpture is not so much a reference to
a specific staircase as it is a means to speaking
about the people who used it, and capturing
something of the sense of a place.
A surprising addition here is a selection of
the artist’s works on paper. Rarely shown, these
denote Whiteread’s poetic inclination towards
abstraction: a painted, semifolded cardboard
work, reminiscent of Richard Tuttle’s composi-
tions, looks like a template for an unrealisable
structure; details of a chevron-motif floorboard,
painted on graph paper, suggest an Agnes
Martin-like grid; the perspective of a zigzagging
staircase, outlined in correction fluid on black
paper, collapses under the repetition of vertical
lines, seemingly dripping from each angle of
its steps. These works offer a refreshing counter-
point to an exhibition that risks running out
of steam. Whiteread’s recent series, including
almost-pristine translucent-resin casts of doors
and window frames as well as shed facades
in papier-mâché, seem to lack the poignant
presence of so much of the other work here.
Repetition can only run for so long before
it starts to lose any virtue. Louise Darblay

Hayward Gallery, London 25 January – 22 April
Andreas Gursky’s photographs are infinity
mirrors. At least here, in the newly renovated
Hayward Gallery, this is the illusion: all ten
rooms are filled with photographs of other
spaces. Works that are large-format behave as
portals to other places – such as Dolomites, Cable
Car (1987), in which a single orange cab seem-
ingly floats midair among fog-heavy mountains,
the cables rendered near-invisible, or Mülheim,
Anglers (1989), which presents a sweeping river
that ends in the distance where a concrete
overpass bridges the waterway and grey sky.
These are set alongside smaller-scale works that
appear more like windows presenting scenes
of the quotidian: people engaging in football
practice or paddling at a public swimming pool
(Zürich I, 1985, and Ratingen, Swimming Pool, 1987),
or a field of chickens amidst which a cockerel is
photographed mid-strut (Krefeld, Chickens, 1989).
The austere aesthetic of these photographs
makes them formally beautiful to look at,
reminiscent of the objective vision of Gursky’s
teachers Bernd and Hilla Becher, who were
famed for documenting industrial buildings.
As a member of the Düsseldorf School, a
group of students taught by the Bechers, Gursky’s
works carry traces of influence from the new
topographics photographers; a term coined
in 1975 for a group of mostly American
Rhine ii, 1999/2015, inkjet print, 238 × 408 × 6 cm. © the artist / dacs, London.
Andreas Gursky
photographers, but also the Bechers, who were
known for formal and stylistically dispassionate
works that addressed the urban banal and
man-modified landscapes by combining a
traditionally ‘objective’ documentary style with
the formal elements of fine art. For example,
Rhine ii (1999/2015) is a landscape split into
six horizontal strips: a grass bank divided by
a pathway, the river and opposite green bank
make up half the photograph, the rest is sky.
It turns out this image is digitally altered –
a power station was removed from the scene.
This linearity, a compositional technique
favoured by Gursky, recalls the abstract style
of Lewis Baltz. Aerial shots are a reminder of
Joe Deal. The colour and subjects of Utah (2017)
and Ibiza (2016), both drive-by photographs,
look like a homage to Stephen Shore.
But these associations are also a harbinger
of how one might perceive other works in this
retrospective. Aletsch Glacier (1993) is a landscape
that evokes the sublime, akin to the works
of twentieth-century American photographer
Ansel Adams, and hangs next to Niagara Falls
(1989), a photograph of passenger ferry Maid
of the Mist as it heads towards the crashing falls,
two birds wheeling above – a postcard trope.
It’s difficult to shake the feeling that these are
images and subjects that have been seen many
Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London & Los Angeles
March 2018
times before – which is where this retrospective
starts to feel repetitive, particularly among works
produced in the last two decades, which appear
to focus on large crowds of people, scenes of late
capitalism, the environment and mass produc-
tion. Perhaps this is the point, as demonstrated
by the rows of stock shelved in Amazon (2017) and
99 Cent ii, Diptych (2001) (both of which represent
capitalism) or by the lines of tulips on a farm
in Untitled xviii (2015). But in these examples,
as in photographs like Nha Trang (2004) and
Pyongyang vi (2007/17), I am further reminded
of Ron Fricke’s 1992 documentary film of the
human condition in the age of globalisation,
Baraka, in which fast-flowing imagery of factory
production lines and mass choreographies
of people performing either religious ceremo-
nies or civil celebrations feature.
In this survey exhibition, Gursky’s oversize
photographs trigger a psychic Google Image
search result, making it difficult to find what
French philosopher Roland Barthes called
the punctum – that small detail or accident
in a photograph that ‘pricks’ or ‘bruises’ the
viewer; that which etches the image into your
memory. Instead, there’s the sense you could
be here for hours scrolling through an infinite
number of similar searches, staring into
endlessness. Fi Churchman
105
 The Land We Live In – The Land We Left Behind
Hauser & Wirth Somerset 20 January – 7 May
We’re living through a period of radical change
in our relationship to the rural. For the first time
since the Industrial Revolution, more people
in the uk are moving to the countryside than
are leaving it. And this is echoed by all sorts
of ongoing cultural trends, from the growth in
organic eating to the publishing boom in nature
writing. So it’s with a certain sense of inevita-
bility that Hauser & Wirth Somerset should
mount an exhibition exploring our connection
to the land, and its shifting meanings over time
– after all, the venue itself is a former farm, with
an attached restaurant serving locally sourced
produce, and seems to extol many of the present-
day pleasures of country living.
The potential scope of the subject, of course,
is vast – and that’s even with landscape as a
genre being only briefly touched upon by the
show. Rather than aiming to cover the whole
territory, then, the exhibition takes the form
of a curatorial essay (as put together by Adam
Sutherland of Grizedale Arts, another rural-
based organisation), one that ranges across
all sorts of curious highways and byways, both
contemporary and historical – taking in not
only works of art, but also rustic artefacts, and
ephemera from lp covers to postcards. And for
the most part, it’s a rich harvest. With hundreds
of items on display, it seems invidious to name
Marcus Coates, Apple Service Provider, 2017, performance. Photo: Andy Gott.
106
just a few, but any list of highlights would
surely include the exquisite, bucolic etchings
of Samuel Palmer and William Blake; Giuseppe
Arcimboldo’s iconic quartet of portraits depict-
ing seasonal figures formed from plants and
vegetables; a lovely little botanical drawing
by Beatrix Potter that verges on abstraction;
and an early Paul McCarthy photowork of dirt
being thrown (arguably a metaphor for how
the rest of his career would develop).
Still, this roving, transhistorical approach
also presents certain problems. The show is
organised into thematic sections – but corralling
so many pieces together can sometimes feel
slightly indiscriminate or cursory. The second
section, in particular, ostensibly explores social
movements and back-to-the-land ideologies;
and much of the material, from ‘Arts and Crafts’
publications to ornate Women’s Institute tea
towels, is engaging. But scattered throughout are
old-fashioned farming tools and items of dress,
which feel rather out of place, and need a fuller
explanation to seem more than tokenistic, while
other pieces appear merely to invoke concepts
rather than address them: John Ruskin, for in-
stance, may have been a crucial figure in reviving
rural handicraft traditions, but his own self-
portrait doesn’t tell us anything relevant. And
besides, such historical works tend to sit rather
© the artist. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Somerset
ArtReview
awkwardly alongside the contemporary ones,
a large number of which convey a less earnest,
more ironic take on nature – led by Marcus
Coates’s whimsical animal-roleplay projects.
Other thematic strands, however, are far
stronger. The real meat of the show is its engage-
ment with ideas of production and social
systems – whether that’s the food-generating
installations at the exhibition’s start, such as
Hayatsu Architects’ Community Bread Oven (2017),
or Fernando García-Dory’s cheesemaking hub,
Mobile Dairy School (2016), or the examples
of countrified advertising adorning the walls
in the final room. The point, ultimately, is about
manufacturing – whether manufacturing meals
or manufacturing meaning – and how we, as
human beings, for good and for ill, have always
necessarily lived in an inherently processed
world. In that sense, perhaps the most powerful
piece, certainly the most visceral and distressing,
is Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s feature-length film,
Our Daily Bread (2005), which depicts mechanised
techniques of industrialised farming: the crops
being automatically harvested and sorted;
the conveyor belts of battery animals being
grotesquely butchered; and the human workers
being also reduced, through their mindless
repetitions, to merely another sort of machine.
Gabriel Coxhead
Fernando Garçia Dory and Hayatsu Architects, Goat Pavilion, 2017, mixed media,
dimensions variable. Photo: Ken Adlard. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Somerset

March 2018 107


Martos Gallery, New York 14 December – 27 January
‘Life doesn’t compute,’ the critic Bruce Hainley
once offered as a summation of the oeuvre of
Hanne Darboven (an armoury of endless looped
scrawls and unequivocal equations, neatly inked
on graph paper and filling up calendar grids).
One is reminded of the resolute will with which
the German artist produced those obsessive
ledgers when viewing Kathleen White’s A Year
of Firsts (2001), a suite of 40 drawings in paint,
ink, pastel and other media on rag paper, many
accompanied by explanatory pencilled captions
and each marking a separate day in 2001. The
New York-based artist is perhaps best known
for her work commemorating friends lost to
the city’s aids crisis during the 1980s and 90s
– a time in which death appeared to strike at
random, picking off members of her community
without logic or reason. White, who died of lung
cancer in 2014, created these modest works on
paper in response to the death of her father early
in 2001 (also to lung cancer) and loss of her
brother to a prison sentencing in March of that
year. The spare, abstract compositions, arranged
in chronological order to span three gallery
walls, track her emotions on each date. The
paintings commemorate ‘firsts’ not in the sense
of new beginnings, but rather in terms of the
inaugural steps of a slow march ever farther from
A Year of Firsts (detail), 2001, 40 works on paper, 42 × 30 cm. Courtesy the artist and Martos Gallery, New York
108
Kathleen White A Year of Firsts
an irrecoverable past. Their oblique, sometimes
tortured scrawls are testaments to the impossible
task of wresting sense from tragedy.
Some dates are milestones: White dedicates
one painting to her brother’s first birthday spent
incarcerated, another to the first time she found
herself forgetting and then remembering that
her father was gone. Others are prosaic: the first
trip to the corner store since his death; the first
Labor Day since his passing. These are inter-
spersed with still other drawings dedicated
to loved ones lost to aids as well as to her sister
Charlene, who was killed by a drunk driver
in 1998 and whose death haunted the White
family. In each, the artist’s dating is overshad-
owed by the gesture’s seeming insufficiency
in the face of the passage of time. In another
week, it would be a year and a week since the
anniversary in question. Would the date’s
resonance still hold?
While Darboven’s precise notations are
intentionally oblique and incoherent, as if to
underscore the futility of attempting to create
order out of trauma (in the senior artist’s case,
the experience of witnessing the Second World
War and its aftermath), White’s are tender
and confessional in their frank admission
of personal loss. Even more direct, albeit less
ArtReview
overtly autobiographical, is her four-channel
1988 video installation (mounted in the centre
of the gallery), The Spark Between L And D. On
four monitors, which play the looped 11-minute
video at varying points in its duration, the artist
is shown, in a nurse’s dress emblazoned with
international flags, intoning the chorus from
On Broadway and slapping her face until it
appears to bleed profusely. She then proceeds
to bandage the entirety of her body while
continuing to sing, until her mouth is muffled
by gauze, stopping only when she can no longer
move. The application of these bandages, stop-
gaps that do nothing to redress the violent
assault upon the artist’s body in the video’s
opening, and which ultimately silence her
into submission, is an obvious allusion to
New York City’s inadequate response during
the 1980s to its escalating aids crisis. Yet the
work additionally calls to mind inner turmoil
and the desire for self-harm exacerbated
by cosmetic attempts to suppress this urge.
Perhaps it also speaks to personal guilt.
While The Spark… finds White fuelled
by anger, in her subdued, elegiac paintings
of 2001, she has transitioned to – if not
acceptance – acknowledgement of the inher-
ent chaos of loss. Cat Kron

Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York 27 October – 13 January
I am embarrassed to admit how much time
I spend looking at dog memes. I’ll spend hours
on Instagram profiles called ‘pupflix’, ‘doggos-
beingdoggos’ or ‘doggosdoingthings’, so much
time that I’ve lost track of all the places propa-
gating captioned canine content to my phone.
My favourite trope is the owner who has caught
an overzealous pup in the act – she’s fetched
more than one ball, or she has human food
in her mouth. The dog’s expression anxiously
acknowledges her human companion’s presence,
though the caption reads: ‘Who’s a good boy?’
Oh, doggo, I can’t get enough of you. I love you
no matter what.
I doubt that I’m the only person whose
mind wanders to canine love in the presence of
Liz Magor’s exhibition Previously… Historically,
Magor has dedicated a large portion of her work
to studying the intimate relationship between
pets and people, and issues of submission and
control, habit and compulsion, companionship
and codependency, and love and need are evi-
dent in this new crop of sculpture and wall work.
The latter hit right at the heart of these matters.
Liz Magor Previously…
Care comes across as compulsive in Toolshed
(Wood Stain) (all works 2017): Magor has crafted
a neatly folded cellophane covering for a wool
blanket scarred with what look like chemical
burns – God, why on earth would this old rag
need a wrapper? The same could be said for
Toolshed (Marine Paint), a similar wall-mounted
piece with a hole-ridden blanket. Whatever has
brought the textile to its bedraggled condition
is beside the point. At best, it is only fit for a dog.
Magor’s deftness with materials and craft
come across in another series of sculptures that
could double as dog beds. They’re plaster-cast
from discarded cardboard, and are raised an inch
or two above the ground. Our New Sweaters stages
a scene of tenderness and friendship: a pair
of teddy bears embracing on a blanket of Mylar
(the kind typically seen in gift-wrapping) at the
centre of this platform. Magor appreciates these
moments of care and intimacy. In Valley she
has created plastic sheaths to protect a series
of otherwise goofy dog toys. Nest is a plaster cast
of a peaceful dead bird, and though the material
speaks to impoverished origins, the periwinkle
Ladie’s Garment (detail), 2017, textile, polymerised gypsum,
104 × 121 × 53 cm. Photo: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy the artist
and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
March 2018
with which she has pigmented the sculpture
gives it high-end, artisanal appeal.
The three series of sculptures makes for
a decent introduction to Magor’s work, but
I might expect a more focused presentation
for the artist’s debut New York solo show. Then
again, the Vancouver-based Magor has been
at it for nearly 40 years, and the title of the
exhibition could be read as a rejoinder,
particularly to New York audiences: where
exactly have you been for the last four decades?
The remaining sculptures also attest to her
rigorous sculptural dialect. Doe-eyed stuffed
animals dangle perilously from sweaters in
Oilmen’s Bonspiel, Pembina and Ladie’s Garment.
The titles come from the patches sewn onto
each sweater’s chest, which would also signify
membership in the labour unions and social
clubs that are a central part of life in Canada’s
oil and gas boomtowns. Judging from their
condition, I’d be damned if both the toys and
the garments hadn’t been found in thrift stores.
Nobody wants to be out in the cold, and
everybody deserves a friend. Sam Korman
109

80wse, New York 1 December – 17 February
When Thomas More wrote Utopia (1516), he
envisaged his invented, idealised realm as a
reclusive island of the ‘New World’, a republic
with social, religious and political customs
reminiscent of a monastery. Perhaps utopias
have always been deemed impossible sites pre-
cisely because of their envisioned and exotic
isolation from the global forces of power and
capital, which in reality surround and affect
every community on the planet. Yet one
is tempted to apply such a narrative to the
remarkable story of Solentiname, the isolated
island at the southern end of Lake Nicaragua.
Consisting mainly of farmers who had suffered
greatly from a lack of basic resources under
the country’s long-reigning Somoza regime,
it was transformed into a revolutionary artistic
community by the priest and poet Ernesto
Cardenal upon his arrival there in 1965.
Practising his own take on liberation theology
from a chapel distinct for its colourful, glass-
clad facade, Cardenal’s society would attract
several us artists and poets during the so-called
Central American crisis, which saw violent us
intervention in the region in order to dismantle
several pro-communist revolutions, and would
come to play a central role in the 1979 revolu-
tion led by the Sandinista National Liberation
Front. Dreams of Solentiname bravely sets out to
mediate this complicated history of political
resistance through aesthetics, and its resonance
in a North American context.
Spread over five galleries, the exhibition
begins in reverse, with a partial display of
Group Material’s Timeline: A Chronicle of U.S.
Intervention in Central and Latin America, a 1984
installation by the New York artist collective
originally shown at P.S. 1. The work conveys in
factual and chronological fashion the political
history of the region from a North American
perspective, focusing specifically on the century-
long history of intervention by the us govern-
ment. Below a bold red line, running horizon-
tally along two walls, a disparate group of
cultural artefacts (from works of art to revolu-
tionary propaganda) recounts a material history
of the conflict-ridden relations between the
us and its southern neighbours, while docu-
ments from the group’s own activist engage-
ment (shows, fundraisers, rallies) under the
Reagan administration sit above. Group
Material in many ways spearheaded the New
110
Dream of Solentiname
York artworld’s response to the Central and
Latin American crises, and actively speculated
on the politics of narrative authority: who
gets to speak, who is represented, in a conflict?
If Group Material provides a factual
contextualisation, Susan Meiselas’s meditative
photojournalism adds a haunting visuality
to the story of Nicaragua’s violent dictatorship
and subsequent revolution, which displaced
tens of thousands of people. The American
photographer travelled to the region to docu-
ment the lived experience of the Nicaraguan
people during the late-1970s insurrection
and published her images in magazines and
newspapers around the world, as well as in
her book Nicaragua: June 1978 – July 1979 (1981).
Here, selected images – striking and paradoxical
scenes of a war-torn country – are installed
on a dim corkboard background: a desperate
mother fleeing with her naked child; revolu-
tionary youths veiled in homemade balaclavas
and practising throwing contact bombs;
President Anastasio Somoza, cool and dressed
all in white, entering the National Congress
from his armoured car. Nicaragua’s unruly
and radiant green forests serve as background
to all of this, most stunningly depicted in
Cuesta del Plomo (published in Nicaragua),
wherein a decaying corpse, half-eaten by
vultures, is enfolded by the bucolic landscape
of the dense rainforest. Across the room, tear
sheets from magazines collected by Meiselas
track how her images were consumed as they
were distributed in the global media. Meiselas,
too, remains ambivalent towards the skewed
representations of war: images aestheticise
violence and pain, but can nonetheless possess
a power as documentation and as monuments.
Meiselas herself has continued to gauge this,
returning to the region in 2004 to install
19 mural-size reproductions of her images
around the country in collaboration with local
communities, creating, according to exhibition
materials, sites for collective memory.
That art serves a meaningful function to the
victims of war was the basic ethos of Cardenal
and the Solentiname community, to which
the rest of the exhibition is devoted. Born in
Granada, 20km outside Managua, Cardenal
enjoyed a moderately successful career in the
us with his sculptures – modernist wood-carved
and glossily painted animal figures reminiscent
ArtReview
of Brancusi – before entering the Abbey of
Gethsemani in Kentucky, where, under the
guidance of fellow poet and monk Thomas
Merton, he developed his popular theories
of liberation through communist interpreta-
tions of Catholicism. At Solentiname he
spread his gospel while encouraging creativity,
bringing along young Nicaraguan artist Róger
Pérez de la Rocha to teach technical aspects
of painting to the increasingly autonomous
community, which they adopted as a way
to make sense of the devastating experience
of the unfolding revolution. Striking are the
many densely detailed oil paintings in their
one-to-one allegorising of political violence
via classic biblical motifs: in Esperanza
Guevara’s La Traición (The Betrayal, 1975),
Somoza soldiers acts as stand-ins for Romans
in a ‘Judas kiss’ scene; while Julia Chavarria’s
La Matanza de Los Inocentes (Murder of the Innocents,
1984) directly renders the regime’s merciless
slaying of children as Herod’s infanticide in
Bethlehem. In a palette of luminous greens,
purples and reds – echoed, too, in Cardenal’s
shiny sculptures – one finds, amidst all this
violence, a persistent longing for the ideal-
ised image of Paradise, an image to which
Solentiname’s lush landscape so easily lends
itself. Over the course of a decade, Solentiname
would house several us and Latin American
artists and poets (such as Juan Downey and
Julio Cortázar), some of whom were even
invited to exhibit their paintings at institu-
tions in the us. After the revolution, Cardenal
would serve as the re-formed country’s first
minister of culture.
A site of faith, aesthetics and revolution-
ary politics, the story of Solentiname feels
more unreal in the context of today’s ongoing
conflicts in the small Central American country,
where the leftist reformist president Daniel
Ortega, a founding member of the Sandinistas
and former close ally of Cardenal, has been
criticised for severe human-rights violations
and a progression towards autocracy. Yet, if
the nature of politics and power is as cyclical
as Nicaragua’s history suggests, there might
also be hope that the utopian organisation
of civil life is a recurrently possible scenario,
one that again and again spurs radical political
imagination through the productive synthesis
of art and politics. Jeppe Ugelvig
top Susan Meiselas, Nicaragua: June 1978 – July 1979 above Esperanza Guevara, La Traición (The Betrayal),
(detail), 1981, photobook. Courtesy the artist 1975, painting, 36 × 55 cm. Courtesy Hermann Schulz

March 2018 111


Marlborough Contemporary, New York 6 January – 10 February
Lucretia My Reflection (1987) by the Sisters
of Mercy queues up in my mind at the sight
of Survival Research Laboratories’ big, nasty,
overaccessorised machines at Marlborough
Contemporary: “I hear the roar of a big machine
/ Two worlds and in between / Hot metal and
methedrine…” On that note, near the entry
is Mr. Satan Head (2007), a malevolent milled-
steel visage attached to a furnace and mounted
onto a reconfigured military munitions loader.
Satan’s firepower suspended, the gaping eyes
and mouth loom with the threat of some
pyrotechnic pagan performance.
srl has titled the exhibition Inconsiderate
fantasies of negative acceleration characterized by
sacrifices of a non-consensual nature – a clunky,
overwrought, wilfully disturbing manifesto,
perhaps. The Sisters’ lyrics often seem, on closer
examination, rather empty, describing nothing
more particular than a mood or generic apoca-
lyptic tableau. Prior to the reveal/roar of srl’s
misaligned industry, there emerges a veritable
press kit in a wall of self-promotional posters
at the gallery entry espousing srl’s flaws, or
virtues, as it were – ‘Useless Mechanical Activity’,
shouts one; ‘A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief’,
sniffs another. That srl might, in the form of
their own promotional material, attempt an end
run around likely criticism of their work speaks
to both the juvenility and the overwhelming
character of much of it: machinery alternately
clanging and wickedly inert, capable of awesome,
random, arguably pointless destruction.
Fanuc rt3 robot, electronics, 234 × 183 × 152 cm. Courtesy the artist
112
Survival Research Laboratories
The principle here is machines up to no
good, retooled by srl with the heady, high
drama of mechanical power. Pitching Machine
(1999–2017) features a Lexan and steel cube
into which a series of gears, armatures and
power sources hurl, at speeds well over 300kph,
2×4s, which then splinter against a heavily
armoured wall, and accumulate. Pitching
Machine represents a tamed weapon into which
material is mauled, and trapped, to little end
other than a demonstration of power. Taming
it further is a gallery setting, to say nothing
of concerns for public safety – Pitching Machine
was operated only at an inaugural event for the
exhibition; within the show, the only machine
actually moving (thankfully) is Fanuc Robot Arm
(1992), in which a robot controls the panning,
sweeping movement of a large television screen
attached to a rotating arm. On the screen plays
footage of one of srl’s demolition derbies,
their machines fighting each other in a battle
with no concept of victory.
Rotary Jaws with Squirrel Eyes (1987) seems
to mock the magical realism implicit in the fear
that machines, which we create and control,
might gain sentience. The rusty teeth of a bear
trap form a skewering grin, above which two
glass spherical ‘eyes’ watch – actual dead
squirrels form each eye’s ‘iris’. The sculpture
is googly-eyed, cartoonish even, but still scary:
a power supply looms at its base, suggesting
that all it needs to begin its nihilistic chomp
is a grounded outlet. The padded ‘fingers’
Fanuc Robot Arm, 1992, steel, aluminium, hd television,
and Marlborough Contemporary, New York & London
ArtReview
of Track Robot (2015), though similarly power-
less, beckon with a grasping touch that might
quickly escalate from soft to crushing.
Lucretia continues: “…I hear empire down”.
In a recent interview, srl’s founder Mark
Pauline states, ‘As an artist, it’s more exciting
to think of yourself working in a super
right-wing dictatorship where you can’t say
anything directly and everything has to be
implied. Like in the old Soviet Union.’ srl’s
work comments on the industrial as an
appendage of state power – mechanical pro-
duction being the ultimate model worker,
threatened annihilation the ultimate assur-
ance of peace. This fundamental perversion
forming the core of authoritarianism, whether
allegorical or practical, extinguishes the soul
from whatever it aspires to fully control.
So what does that leave?
A YouTube clip from 2012 shows srl’s Spine
Robot (2012–14) sluggishly, but menacingly,
taunting an outdoor audience, its four-
pronged claw lingering at the head of a long,
coiled, snakelike ‘arm’. The lateral undulation
and speedy movement of snakes is still not
completely understood; uncanny, it leaves an
uneasy feeling in the stomach, mine at least.
It’s tempting to read Spine Robot, in its domesti-
cated setting at Marlborough, as little more than
industrial taxidermy, Frankenstein without
the electricity. Lost in the threat of destruction
is its beckoning: “Lucretia, my reflection, dance
the ghost with me…” Aaron Horst

The Contemporary Austin 23 September – 14 January
Dead + Juicy, John Bock’s new film and exhibi-
tion, highlights the bizarre and near-perverse
elements that have characterised the German
artist’s work since he came to prominence
during the early 1990s. The film, clocking in
at precisely one hour, is a circuslike delve into
Bock’s view of Texan culture as seen through
the lens of the state’s capital, Austin.
Bock’s interpretation is rife with what
appear to be misguided ideas of Texan arche-
types mined from the state’s long-maintained
mythical aura, one that lends itself to fairytales
filled with Southern belles and gun-toting
cowboys who wistfully recall the days of Texan
independence over a bottle of Shiner Bock,
and then, three whiskeys later, remind them-
selves of their right to secede. The film portion
of the exhibition, which was shot entirely in
South Austin, sees our hero – a barber named
Lisa – travel to various locations throughout
the city, including: the backyard of what one
might assume is a suburban household (we see
outdoor furniture, a freestanding grill sizzling
with steaks, and parental figures, one of whom
Dead + Juicy (still), 2017, hd video, colour, sound, 59 min 46 sec.
Photo: David Schultz. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Anton
John Bock Dead + Juicy
is inexplicably covered in a plastic mask, the
other in a Jackie O-like ensemble); a traditional
barbershop, the sole Texan particularity of
which is a taxidermy rat (though Texans
traditionally prefer to stuff big-game items);
and a wooded swamp – one of the rare exacti-
tudes in this film, as the Hill Country and its
many lakes make for tree-laden, marshy terrain.
Austin, however, is known for its liberal
tendencies and an affinity for live music that
dares venture from the country genre. It is
arguably Texas’s cultural epicentre, surrounded
by fanatically conservative areas like both
a reject and self-proclaimed rebel – a role
not unlike the one Bock’s adopted hometown
of Berlin plays in Germany. The problem is
that Bock attempts to address contemporary
America, and its cartoonish political situation
under a conservative administration, through
an extreme depiction of a Texan city that
is the exception to the state’s right-leaning
norm. The result feels undercooked, not due
to a lack of ambition, but out of ignorance
of the subject matter.
Kern Gallery, New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles
March 2018
Throughout his artistic oeuvre, Bock is
known for performing nonsensical lectures,
after which the props from these gibberish-
filled talks are left behind as exhibited art
objects. The artist has continued in the same
vein here, but the aforementioned items used
in the film – the grill, a red barber chair, a vintage
record player – do little to complement it, and
fail to stand on their own.
In the accompanying text, Dead + Juicy has
been billed by the artist as an ‘uncanny musical’,
though I would argue that the description suits
neither the film nor the object-based exhibi-
tion. Admittedly, Bock’s latest commission
is indeed strange, but this eccentricity is
commonplace for the artist, a repeated trait
that only serves to heighten this particular
exhibition’s overall absurdity. One does not
leave feeling unsettled or mystified by an
intellectually stimulating strangeness; rather,
the dominant sense is one of exhaustion
over continued nonsense that feels, at times,
intentionally bogus even for the artist
himself. Caroline Elbaor
113

by Norma Stevens and Steven M.L. Aronson Spiegel & Grau, $40 (hardcover)
‘All photographs are accurate,’ Richard Avedon
once said. ‘None of them is the truth.’ The
same could be said regarding biographies,
but especially this recent doorstopper devoted
to the legendary photographer. An entertain-
ing but slapdash book penned by the artist’s
collaborator and business partner Norma
Stevens and writer Steven M.L. Aronson,
the breezy 700-page volume proves substantial
in the same way Perez Hilton is revealing.
A succès de scandale even prior to publication
because of reports that the twice-married
Avedon was bisexual and had affairs with,
among other boldface names, his high school
classmate James Baldwin and the film director
Mike Nichols (according to Stevens and Aronson,
Avedon and Nichols had plans to leave their
wives and elope to ‘Gay Paree’ but eventually
‘chickened out’), Something Personal found public
repudiation immediately after hitting the
bookshelves. The book’s chief challenger: the
Richard Avedon Foundation, which alleges that
the biography is ‘filled with countless inaccura-
cies’ and, additionally, is based on a work of
fiction Avedon was working on when he died.
Presented as ‘equal parts memoir, biography,
and oral history’, Something Personal is less a
traditional biography than a collection of
reminiscences, many of them from celebrities,
ex-celebrities and the celebrity-adjacent.
Crammed to bursting with flashbacks from
figures like Calvin Klein, Brooke Shields,
Storr is a chummy interlocutor in these 61
conversations conducted between 1981 and
2016. Some artists the critic evidently knows
from his former role as curator at moma, New
York: Richard Serra, Gabriel Orozco, Ellsworth
Kelly and Chuck Close, all included here, had
exhibitions during Storr’s 1990–2002 tenure
at the institution (the 1997 interview with Close
was conducted on the occasion of the artist’s
retrospective there). Other relationships run
deeper: there are three separate interviews with
Louise Bourgeois, for example, and Storr feels
114
Books
Avedon: Something Personal
Naomi Campbell, Kelly LeBrock, Bruce Weber,
Jann Wenner and the mononymous hairdresser
Oribe, the book floats on clouds of vernissage
gossip, dinner-table backbiting and after-party
innuendo. Tellingly, the relentless march
of trivial anecdotes quickly forces a sobering
realisation – one does not need to be a millennial
to feel blasé about the better-known titanosaurs
of the pre-Twitter and Facebook age.
Which is not to say that more crucial stories
about the famous photographer’s life and career
are without interest. Avedon was – together
with Irving Penn, with whom he kept up
a dogged Picasso-Matisse rivalry – the most
famous fashion photographer of his time.
His renown notwithstanding, he also struggled
to be taken seriously as an artist. Stevens was
particularly well placed to document what the
photographer himself believed was a textbook
case of acute cognitive dissonance.
As Avedon’s longtime studio director, she
spent 30 years in the photographer’s sparkling
company (the man seemingly knew everybody
and everything on at least six continents). She
also helped orchestrate both his increasingly
demanding and lucrative day-job and the
museum exhibitions he craved like a mother’s
love (Anna Avedon was, predictably, adoring,
even smothering). No wonder the celebrated
photographer remains, to date, the only artist
to have had two Metropolitan Museum of Art
retrospectives during his lifetime.
Interviews on Art
by Robert Storr Heni, £35/$45/€40 (hardcover)
compelled to note that ‘Yvonne [Rainer] and
I have known each other over quite a long time’
at the beginning of their 2009 conversation.
If Storr isn’t too pushy with his subjects, this
ends up working to his advantage. He manages
to tease out personal anecdotes that might
not be forthcoming in a more formal meeting;
stories that bring new insight into these much
written-about names. Painter Peter Saul is happy
to speak of being bullied at school, for example
(and how he started an art club as a result),
and Felix Gonzalez-Torres talks poignantly
ArtReview
Avedon attended to his personal history
like Edward Scissorhands tending a holly
bush. Into his eighties he submitted, unsolic-
ited, new obituaries to The New York Times
several times a year (his greatest fear, Stevens
writes, besides getting fewer column inches
than Penn, was dying the same day somebody
‘even bigger’ kicked the proverbial can).
But, claims Stevens, the artist left the matter
of telling the truth of his life to her. ‘Don’t
be kind – I don’t want a tribute, I want a
portrait,’ he supposedly said to her. ‘Make
me into an Avedon.’ One wonders, after
reading the umpteenth anecdote about the
man’s fastidiously secretive nature, whether
he really intended for his friend and confi-
dante to let it all hang out quite so flabbily.
A master portraitist who was not above
staging his warts-and-all photographs of,
among other subjects, movie actors, politi-
cians, writers, civil rights workers, ranch
hands, newly married couples, swamis,
ex-slaves and wide-beamed Daughters of the
American Revolution, Avedon subscribed to
the idea that his sitters’ peculiarities crucially
also matched his person. ‘My portraits are
more about me than they are about the people
I photograph,’ he said. With Something Personal,
a similar phenomenon is at work. Charming
and engaging at times, like Avedon, the book
is also unfortunately glib, windy and unreli-
able – like its writers. Christian Viveros-Fauné
of his partner Ross Laycock, who died from
an aids-related illness. Storr is comfortable
asking Charles Ray if he thinks the artist’s
sister’s schizophrenia influenced his sculpture
(Ray answers in the affirmative), and the artist
goes on to say he was once abused as a child. This
highly personal biographical detail cannot fail,
for me at least, to cast works such as Boy With
Frog (2009) or Huck and Jim (2014), both featuring
nude adolescent figures, and the orgiastic
Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley… (1992) in a new,
more uncomfortable light. Oliver Basciano
March 2018 115
 Calder, The Conquest of Time: The Early Years, 1898–1940
One doesn’t make it five pages into Jed Perl’s
new biography of Alexander Calder before
getting something close to Perl’s theory of
biography itself: ‘There is a physics of biog-
raphy, one that involves the facts and how
they are related to one another. And there
is a metaphysics of biography, especially the
biographies of creative spirits, that involves
determining how the facts of the artist’s life
somehow fuel the imaginative life.’ It’s a bit
perplexing as to what Perl is after here. By
‘imaginative life’ are we meant to assume
Perl means the artist’s work – presumably the
most direct manifestation of the artist’s own
imaginative efforts? Or is it meant to indicate
something broader, a ‘sensibility’, say, that
goes beyond the dry ‘physics’ of an artist’s life
to get at something like the spirit of his time?
Are we to learn something about Calder’s
work by learning about Calder the man?
Or are we to learn about the ‘age of Calder’?
I’m not sure Perl is clear on the answer him-
self, or indeed if it’s a question he feels needs
posing, at least on the evidence of Calder, The
Conquest of Time: The Early Years, 1898–1940, which
remains, to use Perl’s own terms, at the level of
biographical physics, and rarely rises to anything
like a metaphysics, either about Calder or his age.
Could this all be Calder’s own fault?
Alexander ‘Sandy’ Calder is a curious giant
Edited by Tuli Kupferberg Primary Information, $40 (boxset)
This boxed facsimile reissue of the ten staple-
bound pamphlets published as yeah (1961–65),
a zine put together by the New York poet and
musician who would go on to form The Fugs,
is an antic compendium of its editor’s interests
and preoccupations at this inflection point in
American history and culture. Subtitled ‘a satyric
excursion, a sardonic review, a sarcastic epitome,
a chronicle of the last days’, yeah comprises a
mix of literary matter and newspaper clippings.
Poems, facetious contracts, film reviews by
bureaucrats and short stories by men and women
(mostly) of the underground address social
mores, racism, military blunders, the pursuit
of sex and love, pomposity, toilet habits, nuclear
annihilation and much else besides.
The tone, overwhelmingly satirical with
a pinch of beatnik, is aimed at highlighting
116
by Jed Perl Alfred A. Knopf, $50/£35 (hardcover)
in the menagerie of modern art. A figure
at once immensely visible (what childhood
of the past 50 years has not been introduced
to, or produced, a variation on Calder’s greatest
contribution to the history of art: the mobile?)
and admired (by giants of Modernism,
eg Cocteau, Duchamp, Miró), and yet oddly
without acolytes.
Calder’s mobiles, his Cirque Calder (1926–31),
even his wonderfully deft and economical
wireworks have not posed challenges for
subsequent generations of artists. Not in
the way that Constantin Brancusi or Alberto
Giacometti remain artists with whom a young
sculptor often must contend – or avoid. Calder’s
greatest work, by contrast, requires acknowl-
edgement, even admiration, but no one
today is wrestling with it, or crediting it with
opening up new horizons of artistic practice,
or damning Calder for getting there first, or
doing it better.
Could it be that Calder the man just isn’t
all that fascinating? Perl’s early chapters on
the Calder family – on A. Stirling and Nanette,
Calder’s very accomplished artist parents,
and on the family’s moves from East Coast
(Philadelphia) to West (Pasadena) and back
(Croton-on-Hudson) following Stirling’s
career – on Calder’s exposure to a wide range
of top talents at the turn of the century and
yeah
the absurdities of modern life, and, implicitly,
carving out an alternative space in a conserv-
ative society (Kupferberg’s Birth Press, founded
with wife Sylvia Topp, also published ‘1001
Ways to Live Without Working’, 1961, 25¢).
In one poem we meet the familiar ‘Lord
High Curator in Charge of Castrations and
Paper Clips’; in ‘A yeah Extra’ titled Kill
Magazine, we are treated to an appreciation
for Adolf Eichmann on the occasion of his
execution (‘Eichmann was a small clerk in
the German government…’), and a political
ad foreshadowing another: the drawing
of a noose over the line ‘Impeach the Traitor
John F. Kennedy’. And then an entreaty:
‘Come lover / Carpe penem’.
The balance of the material consists of
unlikely headlines, small-town perspectives
ArtReview
on Calder’s education at the Stevens Institute
of Technology and at the Art Students League
in New York, all combine into a dense portrait
of a young artist who appears more or less at
ease with the advancing artistic life that in
many ways was destined to become his own.
Then there’s Paris, where Calder falls
in with the right crowd right away, makes
important friends (Duchamp), gains recogni-
tion and all through the interwar years
never sheds the impression that he is the
big American boy, the ‘man cub’, a title that
Calder’s father had given to one of his own
early sculptural portraits of his son. Calder’s
peers in the 1920s and 30s may have been
fascinated by him, but on the page, in Perl’s
hands, exactly what animates Calder and his
own ‘imaginative life’ is difficult to parse.
Mostly Calder’s life comes across as rather
charmed: ‘On the boulevard Arago…,’ Perl
writes, ‘Sandy and Louisa plunged back into
the rounds of entertainment that had always
characterized their life in Paris.’ On the same
page, Perl tells how Matisse and Duchamp
show up one night, and that ‘it’s unclear, but
Henry Miller may have also been among the
group’. Unclear? With numerous statements
of this sort salting the pages of Calder, one
feels the need to ask Perl if there is a physics
of gossip as well. Jonathan T.D. Neil
and, most enthusiastically, advertisements
– want ads, ads for police dogs or the latest
circumcision tool, fur-lined potties, a suspi-
ciously vibratorlike ‘clipper’ advertised with
‘special low price for nuns’. Over the lifespan
of yeah, these excerpts from other media,
arranged by Kupferberg in dense collages,
crowded out and then entirely replaced the
literary material, a sign of confidence, perhaps,
that the absurdity spoke for itself. I prefer
to think that his interests and energies had
passed to The Fugs, founded with fellow
poet Ed Sanders between issues 9 and 10, and
sounding, in its mordant, bawdy celebration
of an unshackled, political life, like nothing
so much as an arrangement in guitar, drums,
keyboard and raspy voices of these typewritten,
mimeographed pages. David Terrien
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March 2018 121

 A Curator Writes March 2018

I am sitting in front of the splendid neon work Run from Fear, Fun and unalloyed pleasure. That is why we are here. We need to talk to
from Rear in Bruce Nauman’s Artist Rooms at Tate Modern, and my someone from this country who we can trust.”
thoughts turn to the tremendous largesse of dear Anthony d’Offay. The waiter brings me my usual plate of spaghetti lobster and glass
His gifts to Britain’s artworld have been many and varied, and of Barolo without asking.
I ponder them as I move to Nauman’s seminal work Good Boy Bad Boy. “What is it, Gianluigi?”
I settle down as the figures on the two screens chant, “I am a good “Well, the thing is, it’s Ralph. You know, we’ve appointed him as
boy”, “You are a good boy”, “We are good boys…”, but then my director of the next edition of the Biennale? We were all so impressed
telephone rings. I fish the vibrating device out of my pocket. It is with his curatorial gesture of deconstructing the public spaces of
Alexander, my new trusty assistant. a museum by refusing visitors for two years at the Hayward Gallery.
“Ivan, it’s urgent,” he begins. “Venice wants to see you this after- Such a brilliant act of subversion! It reminded us of Cattelan’s first-
noon. The Biennale people. Perhaps they want to talk through the ever exhibition, when he padlocked the gallery and claimed he’d be
misunderstanding of a few years back.” back soon. Torno subito!”
I get up and scurry out of the gallery towards the inexplicable “Ah…” I look up from the spaghetti.
lifts of the Blavatnik Building. Queues of tourists watch the lift indi- “But now we hear of this artist who took down the painting of
cator lights go up and down without the lifts ever reaching our floor. the nymphs in Manchester. And then she put it back a few days later!
I think of dear Len Blavatnik and wonder if part of Another radical gesture! No to nymphs and then yes, go on then,
the $1 million he donated to Donald Trump’s yes to nymphs! And we are thinking that this is perhaps even
inauguration committee might have been better more radical than Ralph. We wanted to talk to a real expert and
spent on more effective elevators. Still, Maria I knew you would take my call.”
Balshaw must be proud of her institution’s “Well, Gianluigi, Ralph hasn’t just curated 20 shows,
ability to attract such high-calibre philan- he’s curated one show 20 times. Scene of a Crime, Psycho
thropists as d’Offay and Blavatnik. As Buildings, psycho killer, psycho guy! Then again, the
Maria said when she took the job, ‘We need nymphs going up and down is very compelling. But I feel
to speak to the whole of society’, and with you need something more. Someone who will be able to
these two fine gentlemen leading the charge, phone a friend to do the first interview into their new job
who can doubt her? and exclusively reveal that he is very attractive, has three
Eventually downstairs and outside, I hail a good old- gym memberships and a Bernie Sanders mug, and freely offers
fashioned black taxi and direct the driver to head to Cecconi’s wine, tequila and Xanax in that order.”
and not spare the horses. We trundle along the river and “Pronto!” an excited Gianluigi exclaims.
over Waterloo Bridge with an entertaining and counter- “Phone David Velasco at once!”
intuitive conversation about how cycle routes are the main I. Kurator
cause of increased air pollution in London. I must say I rather
find myself agreeing with my new friend from Essex as we
pull up in Mayfair.
I am ushered to a corner table where a small group awaits me.
“Gettar le margherite si porei!” I greet them in the simple
Italian vernacular that I remember from reading Lodovico
Dolce’s Il dialogo della pittura, intitolato l’Aretino during
my days at the Courtauld.
“Ivan, it is good to see you,” one of the group
replies, clearly appreciating my mastery of his
language by responding in my own.
“Look, Gianluigi, if this is about the incident
at the end of Utopia Station in the 2003 edition
of the Biennale, I can only apologise. I thought
no one would see the assistant convener of the
Lithuanian Pavilion and myself having an urgent
meeting under Liam and Rirkrit’s wooden plat-
form. How was I to know that the slats were remov-
able? As for the denouement in Tobias’s communal
showers, what can I say? I frutti proibiti sono i più dolci
and all that, eh?”
“Ivan, we have moved beyond that now. La necessità non
ha legge. We know you are a man seeking aesthetic perfection

122 ArtReview
Grimaldi Forum Monaco / 28-29.04.2018 / artmontecarlo.ch